Night Owl Cards

  I pulled the latest magazine issue of Beckett Vintage Collector out of the mailbox on Monday and paged through it without any urgency. I didn't have an article due to run, the last of them was in the previous issue.   So I was surprised about three articles in to see my name on a story about the 1954 Topps set. By golly, I did write that! More than a year ago!   I had figured that this one wasn't going to run. That happens sometimes, it happened to one of my articles once before. And being a writer and editor for a newspaper, I understand how that goes. Sometimes the article doesn't fit, there are too many other articles that are more timely or have better art or whatever. Or, heck, maybe the idea just isn't solid. I'll acknowledge that with this one, it wasn't one of my better ones.   But I was happy to see it in print. I've now appeared in the last three Beckett Vintage Collector issues, which had never happened before (there won't be a fourth straig...

  Wow, not off to the greatest start for Year 18 with this blog. Posting is likely to be a bit sporadic the next couple weeks. Nothing unfortunate, just one of those life whirlwinds where a bunch of disconnected things come together to conspire against my hobby.   Just as this busy period got started, I was getting my lunch on Saturday when my wife dropped the mail on the counter. The October/November Beckett Vintage Collector jumped right out to me. "Here already?" I said.   I turned the pages and there was the second article I wrote for them this past spring.     I did not expect to see this issue until early October. That was about the time the August-September issue arrived (early August) and -- wham -- a month later I'm discussing my latest article. I'm not used to the magazine world moving so fast! Isn't this "old media"?   The cover teases to my story this time, always a little thrill in itself.   And speaking of thrills, yes, this article was i...

  The most recent Beckett Vintage Collector arrived in my mailbox Monday and with it my latest article for the magazine.   It's the 20th article I've written for the magazine as I'm coming up on six years since first joining the writing roster there. But it's also been a year since I've had a story published, mostly due to 1) Far less time to devote to magazine writing, thanks to my "real job" and 2) Plain running low on ideas.   But I'm glad I had enough to get me to 20. I'm fairly happy with the subject of this article. It's certainly something I can relate to considering my profession. It's about the many examples of name errors on sports cards.   I know the struggle well -- we publish sports names almost every day at my job. But it still was surprising how many name errors I came across while researching for this story (and how many more emerged once I announced my story had published).   I quickly realized I would not be able to includ...

  It's another "long weekend" with just two days off for me. But it was enough time for my hobby to travel north for a brief visit.   Yesterday I finally paged the 1983 O-Pee-Chee set that I received from Angus of Dawg Day Cards months ago and put them in a binder. It kind of violated my new rule of "no incomplete sets in a binder" as I still need 67 cards to finish it. But I consider it a priority set -- anything from 1983 is -- even if I don't spend much time on it for awhile. It's just a relief to stop staring at that stack.   Then today I was sitting in a hospital lab waiting room -- I'm telling you, it's just another Monday around here -- and thought enough to bring some reading material. It was the latest copy of Beckett Vintage Collector with David Clyde on the cover.   I've read that story already, and the one after it. But the one up next, that I read fully during my 45-minute wait, was also related to O-Pee-Chee.   This was written...

  The latest edition of Beckett Vintage magazine showed up on the porch Monday. It contains my most recent article. The first 50-or-so pages of the issue is about the recently departed Willie Mays. I like the photo spread of every one of his Topps cards. My story shows up on page 72. It's about collector Roy Carlson, who has created a hobby buzz in the last year with his discoveries of picture reuse in Topps' vintage sets. I mentioned that I was doing a story on him in April and it has finally appeared in the August-September issue.    I'm the last person that should be surprised by how slow the wheels operate in the world of print publication, but the ones for magazine publishing are the very slowest. I did the interview in April and wrote the story in May and it shows up three months later. I almost felt like I had to talk to Roy again to update everything!   But I think it's an interesting article anyway. I always feel like I'm doing my job more when I interview...

  Not even three weeks after receiving the Oct/Nov edition of Beckett Vintage Collector with my story on the 1973 Topps set, the Dec/Jan edition arrived with another one of my stories. This was due to whatever delay postponed the arrival of the Oct/Nov issue with Rickey Henderson on the cover (which is now available at a grocery store in town here). But it was still head-spinning to get one magazine issue with my story almost immediately after the other one. The latest edition, with Brooks Robinson on the cover, should be on magazine racks by the end of the month. Mention of my article is at the top of the cover, where it says "That's a Unique Card." That's the start of the article. It's the second story in the edition, after the Brooksie cover story. My mission for this story was to write about "unique" cards within a set, meaning they were issued as part of a set, with a card number on the back, but were unlike any other card in that set. My inspiratio...