Collecting This 'n' That

With the chatter about another potential postal disruption I have been shying away from any substantial mail ordering. Just chipping away with smaller stuff on Sportlots and TCDB.  This week the mail lady brought these goodies.  Sportlots order,  These are three of the final four for this set. Stay tuned...  For 20 cents a pop I added these 1966 Donruss Monkees to the order. At that price they can be a little rough.  _____________________________________ Sportlots auction, 1957 Topps Isolation Booth for the type binder. A 1929 Player's Curious Beaks, and a group of 1990 Red Rose Animals and their Young.  This is currently a mystery card, and the seller had no description for it. That's the reason I wanted it. The card measures 1 1/2" x 2" and is blank backed. It is printed on standard card stock of the era. Checking the books and catalogues provided nothing. A Facebook group of mostly UK members bounced around some suggestions but none hit the target. ...

What is new in hobby land here? Not a whole helluva lot. Family birthday events, summer home projects...you know the drill. I did grab a box of series 2 Topps this morning. The one positive is the number of cards per box, 84. That's decent. Other than that, nothing to get too excited about - run of the mill inserts, no numbered cards or SP's. I have watched quite a few Topps reels on Facebook and some cool stuff has been pulled!  On a recent trip into the city for an appointment I took the opportunity to hit a big box down there. Four clearance packs of 2023 Panini Chronicles came home with me.  This was the biggie from those packs, Take my word for it, it is numbered out of ten on the back. My scanner, other than needing to be cleaned, struggles with some types of cards.  The next pack had this,  This is my first Points card ever. I don't rip much Panini product so I've been fortunate not to have to deal with this. I don't mind straight up redemptions where I know ...

Cheap little lots are fun! This five card bundle arrived the other day.  You are not going to find these your local Pokémon err.. card show.    1909 Player's Nature Series 50 card set. This is the third of these in my collection. It is a little rough as the number in the top right has worn off. It is #15.  1936 Churchman's The Story Of Navigation set of 50. Also the third in my collection.  1937 Churchman's Treasure Trove set of 50. The first of its kind in the binder.  1931 Abdulla Autobilder Serie II 150 card set and another first card for me. These cards are 1 15/16" x 2 15/16" in size. Good quality stock and a matte finish. A very nice 94 year old card.  1961 Topps Sports Cars. 2 1/2" x 4 11/16" 66 card set. I will start to keep an eye out for these in VG-ish condition. I'm up to 5 so far.  They are not crazy expensive if you are ok with lesser condition. Decent copies of singles can be had in the $2-5 range. Watch for cards #32 and 60 as they...

  Happy Father's Day!  Without a doubt I can say   that   I wouldn't be here doing this if it weren't for my father's encouragement of collecting hobbies. Though he never dabbled in cards, he had his own hobby - stamps.  The Scott catalogues, Harris albums, and stock books galore lined the bookshelves of HIS den. My brother and I did join him in the world of philately for a while, but cards were my calling and well, my brother was never really a collector. Unless you count junk at the cottage.  We lost dad unexpectedly 16 years ago and there really isn't a day that I don't think about him at least once. I have his stamp collection all packed up in large Tupperware totes untouched. Someday, soon I hope, I will make time to explore it and remember those days.  Here is a preview of an upcoming set post that features a famous TV dad. Enjoy the day dads!  

Nearly an entire year had passed by from the release date of 2017 Topps Gallery to when discounted packs hit our local store shelves, and it had been over a decade since Gallery was a thing in the hobby so I wasn't sure of what to expect when I grabbed a couple of fat packs. Well hell, these are nice I thought. Two days later I returned to the store and bought all of the packs they had. And everytime they were restocked! Seven years later it is still one of my favorite binders to work on. My base set is still missing many SP's and some insert sets need work. This post will focus on the Canvas parallel. Canvas are fat/hanger pack exclusives, two per pack. The set includes the first 150 cards of the base set. No SP's were included. Thank god for that as the base SP's are tough falling at 1 in 20 packs.  The fellow on the pack was one of the first four Canvas that I owned. That first return trip to the store and pack buying frenzy netted me the big guy.  The decision was m...

Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, Thin Man, Jurassic Park are movies that I will park my ass down to watch, even if they were on part way through.  And there is one more....Grease. Yes, Grease and all its hokey, cheesy goodness. I saw it twice the summer of 1978 and probably once every year since.  Of course I had to have the soundtrack.  The summer of '78 pack buying took every bit of loose change I could muster. Chasing one of my favorite O-Pee-Chee baseball sets and these, The cards I had then are long gone. But I have picked up a couple of lots over the past couple of years. It was finally time to sort and binder them and take a deeper look at this set.  At night's end I had 61 of the 66 cards that make up the set. And 4 enroute. Number 18 was not to be had. This set is notorious for the OPC rough cutting and centering issues as you can see from the sampling above. These flaws, and the low production run, have kept the POP report numbers very low.  BGS has graded ...

Early 90's basketball that is. Most sports card collectors that have bought collections or random bulk boxes without a doubt have some early Skybox, Hoops, Ultra, etc. basketball cards. Are you a collector of these or do they languish in boxes in the closet, garage, or basement. I hope no one stores their cards in the attic. This post is certainly not meant to offend basketball card collectors - cause that's not what we do here. And I mean no disrespect to the cards themselves. Look at the first Skybox set from 90-91. Beautiful cards, but as someone recently wrote, "about as common as a blade of grass". I recently ended up with a day to myself, and the weather was crap, so I grabbed a four-row box of what I knew was basketball cards and dug in. I was hoping to finish a couple of long-lingering sets from the era, and maybe find a few gems.   It turns out that this was a decent box. The empty space shows how many cards were "keepers".  The bottom three finish ...