Night Owl Cards

  I did some light card organizing over the weekend. I moved my 1983 Kellogg's 3-D complete set from binder pages to top loaders, as it's one of the later sets that I'm confident won't crack when confined like that (unlike mid-'70s 3-D sets).   I also moved a small stack of 1981 and 1982 Topps stickers into leftover pages I had bought for early '50s Bowman cards. It took me forever to realize that the stickers would fit that size, too.   I have less than 20 stickers from the '81 set, so it fit into one page (pockets double-bagged). That's a good thing because my 1981 Topps binder is large and STUFFED.    There's a reason for that but just to illustrate how large the '81 binder is, here is a photo of the 1980 Topps and 1981 Topps binders -- both flagship sets complete -- side-by-side.   The 1980 binder is 44 pages (double-bagged, of course) and the 1981 binder -- maybe a little overstuffed is 71 pages -- 71!!!   Where does that compare among the l...

Nick from Dime Boxes sent me some cards a few days ago. He always seems to have one of those Topps Scratch-Offs to throw into the pile. I like these oddballs, particularly since I'm starting to collect the 1970 Topps set (EDIT: This is a '71 Scratch-Off). And when you open one up and find this ... ... it's a bonus. Yes, I'm one of those finicky collectors who likes my cards unscratched. You take what you can get when it comes to scratch-offs, because the urge is STRONG and also because many scratch-offs appeared back in the vintage days (think the 1964 Topps cartoons) when absolutely no one on the planet could resist scratching. So I like that my 1970 1971 Tony Perez scratch-off is unscratched. I also like this: These are 48 scratch-offs from the 1981 Topps Scratch-Off set (or multiplied by three it is 144 scratch-offs). Nick came into a surplus of these and I happily volunteered to take them. I've never seen so many of the '81 Scratch-Off...

A few days ago, I read at Dodgers Blue Heaven that Panini was releasing its Cooperstown series again this year, and that each base card had three different versions. One card number, three photo variations. I shook my head at Panini, which I still have difficulty considering a legitimate baseball card company, pulling something that many take Topps to the woodshed over year after year. But I realized I was reading this at the same time I was unearthing card variations from sets that are decades old, which arrived long before what we consider as the era of variations/parallels. For instance, the above card from the 1983 Authentic Sports Autographs series. The series featured 12-card sets of 11 different Hall of Fame players. Each set also had a separate version in which the first card was autographed. Oh, and you can also find the cards with red or green borders. Which explains this: Each of these are card No. 10: Then, not long after I came across that, I came a...