Wednesday, September 24, 2008

1993 Diamond Marks (When a card is a bookmark)

Like many of the oddball items in my collection, I have no idea how I came about these little gems. I'm sure they were bought online, but just how I even found them is a mystery for another time.

These are 1993 Diamond Marks baseball cards, er, bookmarks. They are long and skinny (much like I was 20 or so years ago). The feature the player's name at the top, a nice, big photo, then the team logo at the bottom. There is also a DM logo in the upper left corner of the player's picture.


The back features a "book border" with a couple more player pics, a team logo as its own bookmark, and little blurb about the player on the right-hand 'page.' There are also various other company IDs: The Colla Collection, (c)BCP, and "designed by Terry Smith Creations." Since Colla put out all kinds of oddball/non-mainstream cards, I'm sure it is safe to assume the pictures came from their photographers.


The cards, er, bookmarks, themselves were sold in sealed foil packs, just like cards. I have a feeling that by marketing them as bookmarks instead of cards, there were some kind of legal loopholes they were able to fit through. That's complete speculation, of course, but what fun is it to simply accept them as bookmarks!? :-) There was a test set done with 10 players and there are inserts of about 10 players... Ironic - bookmark set with inserts, considering you INSERT the bookmark... Is that irony? That whole Alanis song confused me as to what was or was not irony... (Which, by the way, you can look up on youTube and a teacher actually does show which things were or were not ironic in the video, though I digress...)

Believe it or not, a search on your local auction site may yield plenty of "1993 Diamond Mark" results, including unopened boxes for... $2.99!? Complete test sets for $.99!? Seriously? Wow...

3 comments:

PunkRockPaint said...

You stole my next post!!! I use these bad boys as bookmarks all the time. I was tempted to use this set as my first post... I snoozed. I loozed. :)

--David said...

Oh, man, sorry about that! I wish I had known... Well, you can feel free to post your own take on them! :-) As they say, Great Minds Think Alike!

capewood said...

Those are pretty cool.