Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
I can never get enough of 1952 Topps, so when I stumbled on Ted Taylor’s “Milestones” article from the September ’87 Baseball Cards Magazine, I knew I had to share it. Classic read!
I wish I could still get a high-quality set for $23,000, like in 1987! Also, the author mentioned picking up 1952 Topps cello packs the following summer in ’53; I’ve heard about this before and will dig deeper, maybe for a future Unopened Market Report Newsletter. Anywho, here’s the entire piece.
Happy collecting!
It’s always amused me how hobby periodicals advertised on each other’s pages, almost like an endless loop of cross-promotion. So, I wasn’t surprised to find this Baseball Cards Magazine ad in the May 1982 issue of The Trader Speaks.
Baseball Cards Magazine launched in the Spring of 1981, and I’ve long argued that its first few years offered the finest hobby writing ever produced. While it’s cost me more than $2.25 an issue to piece my collection together— it’s a steal for a magazine packed with top-notch articles, checklists, and hobby insight.
Back issues of The Trader Speaks are packed with valuable writing, too, but the advertisements for iconic collectors’ issues, card shows, and vintage pricing information are particularly valuable to me. Adding copies of either publication to your collection is a fantastic way to kickstart a hobby library!
Happy collecting!
Baseball Cards Magazine set the standard for hobby writing; here’s a piece by Tom Lamarre, published in December 1986, about the 1961 Fleer Baseball Greats set.
While Set Registry competition has driven up the prices of high-grade examples for some of the set’s key cards, complete raw sets in decent condition remain surprisingly affordable.
For example, Huggins and Scott sold an Ex to Ex-Mt near set of 152/154 cards for $390 in December 2023.
And Collect Auctions sold a similarly conditioned complete set for $566 in March 2022.
Happy collecting!
“How can you say you’ve got the whole set when you haven’t got what it came in?” Here’s Ed Henderson’s look at the collectibility of wrappers from the November 1992 issue of Baseball Cards Magazine.
PS: I’d love to see a resurgence of multi-page hobby writing like this today.
Check out The Unopened Archive for more!
So many of us overlook card backs in this day of hard plastic card encapsulation and grading, so I was super happy to find an article dedicated to them while perusing the September 1991 issue of Baseball Cards Magazine.
Jim McLauchlin penned an article titled “Card Backs,” in which he celebrated the reverse side of cards. He kicked it off by stating that he likes card backs more than he likes card fronts! Here are the first two pages of the article.
He talks about the plethora of data that has been included on them, chats about some growing pains in card back design in our hobby’s history before digging into the real story, the specific card back highlights over the past 50 years of sports cards that he jokingly called “the first quasi annual Sy Berger Awards for Card Back Excellence (or Lack Thereof).”
I thought the Set Awards were so well-researched and accurate that they deserved to be shared with folks who don’t have junk-wax-era card magazine back issues, so I’ll share a highlight card from many of the categories before sharing the rest of the article.
He noted their incredible variety.
I’ll also note that Guernsey’s sold a lot of original card cartoon art in the 1989 Topps Auction.
Leisure-time activities.
Anything by Upper Deck.
1955 Bowman Baseball.
1990-91 Pro Set Hockey for using terms like rugged blue liners, crafty blue liners, veteran blue liners, and bruising blue liners.
1961 Fleer Football.
Puzzles.
Classic.
1990 Score Football Johnny Johnson.
1975 Topps Carlton Fisk.
1958 Topps Sandy Koufax.
1971 Topps Football Spider Lockhart.
He challenged readers to find a Joe Nuxhall card that didn’t say he was the youngest player in the majors.
1990 Pro Set Football Chris Singleton.
1971 Topps Football Charlie Krueger.
1958 Topps Stan Lopata.
1963 Topps Dick Radatz.
1974-75 Topps Basketball Louis Dampier.
1965 Topps Mike De La Hoz.
1951 Bowman Leo Nomellini.
This 1991 Classic Basketball Draft Picks advertisement takes me back.
We all wanted that Larry Johnson card, thinking it’d be worth a million bucks, but it turns out they printed 450k sets (not exactly a limited production, eh?)!
PS: Here’s the cover of the September 1991 edition of Baseball Cards Magazine, from which I scanned the ad.
The February 1993 issue of Baseball Cards feature called Readers’ Choice not only had a reader call (incorrectly, IMHO) the 1951 Bowman Paul Richards card the worst baseball card of all time, but it also featured this gem from Dan Tisdale about a pair of 1974 Topps football cards.
Here’s each card in full color. What do you think? Are these the worst football cards? Lineman didn’t get the love from Topps in the ’70s!
