Binders aren't enough

 

My collection storage system is built around binders. Boxes are secondary. In a perfect world, all my cards would be in binders and there would be no boxes.

But boxes are easier to store than binders. Binders take up more space. That's a trade-off I've been willing to make, for having a much more pleasing card-room display (shelves of just boxes just doesn't cut it for me). But it means I'm always in space conservation mode.

For example, a couple of weeks ago, Kenny/ZippyZappy asked me if I could use any binders, he had received some regulation-size ones from his father. Always mindful of space issues -- I am almost all out of rows on my two sizable shelving units -- I said maybe one or two.

That's not "one or two." That's six. Actually, he sent seven -- one is out of the box for some mid-1980s Fleer repurposing.

So, yeah, I don't know where the heck those are going. Right now the box is in the attic, waiting for when I need them, or I carve out some space. What I really need in the storage game right now is pages. It seems the last few times I've journeyed to the big box stores, there are no pages for sale. But pages would help me use some of these binders.

The binders by themselves aren't enough and I know they aren't enough to make this an interesting blog post. Who reads a post of just binders?

I did find a Japanese card (Konami) from 2009 of Jose Reyes tucked in one of the binders. I'm a sucker for anything card-like from 2009. I just wrote about that a couple of posts ago.

 

Here's another blast from 2009. I found this in the box, too. I don't wear stuff around my wrists. Just an issue of mine. I ditched watches years ago.

So that's not many card things, so I pulled out a couple other recent acquisitions to fill out this post.

 

I nabbed this 1973 Kellogg's Reggie Jackson from Rob for a price lower than anything I saw on the usual buying sites.

 

Ever since my Kellogg's cracking crisis, I've thought about going after Kellogg's non-cracking set from the '70s more vigorously. I've always ignored it, but I think I can appreciate it more now (as long as a million other people aren't pursuing it, which seems to be the case with the other Kellogg's sets).

Bo of Baseball Cards Come To Life! acquires a lot of cards and quickly. There's going to be a point when I don't have anything to trade him because he's accumulated it all!

But for now I was able to trade for some of his 1965 Topps extras after he landed a small lot of them.

The '65 set is cool for many reasons, I don't need to go through all of them again. But it's also my birth-year set and I'll take cards from this year if they're easy to acquire.

 

Like almost all of the '60s sets, I have no intention of trying to complete the set -- although it'd be a lot easier to finish the '65 than that stupid '67 set I'm currently chasing.

All of these cards will be going in binders, which will start the domino effect of filling out a binder, then needing a new binder to add the overflowing cards, then needing pages to add those cards, then needing a spot on a shelf -- or somewhere -- to put the new binder, then needing a new room to add more cards, then being voted down on the new room by the significant other in the house, then thinking about remodeling the garage for card storage, then thinking how much work and cost that would take, and -- eesh -- this is why people sell cards.

But now is not that time.