It was so cool to take stacks of cards and rubber band them together. It was the thing to do for many a generation of card collecting kids. Well, we know better today. Keep the rubber bands off the cards!!My friend was cleaning out his basement, when he came across a suitcase full of old cards. By old, I mean mostly from the overproduced period of the late eighties and early nineties. My friend thought he had riches upon riches. It almost broke my heart to tell him that they were nearly worthless.
"You don't know that"!
Unfortunately, I do. I know what I'm talking about here. I came to terms, a long time ago, that my heyday of collecting came when the cardboard is usually worth more when recycled.
"You don't know what people are willing to pay for something if they really want it bad enough"!
That is true, but I can stake my reputation that at least 99% of what I found in the suitcase was priceless. And by priceless, I mean that the value per card would be so low that no price could be affixed to the majority of the cards.
I knew I was in for an adventurous night when my friend strolled in with a hardshell powder blue suitcase from the seventies. It even had a mirror embedded into the inside top. It was hideous!
I opened the suitcase and gazed upon a cornucopia of beautiful garbage. To be fair, there were some decent cards in there. Anything before 1986, I considered nice. From 1986 until 1994 there was trash upon trash. There could have been a few nice cards, except for the fact that they were nicked, bent and scuffed beyond salvage.
There were even water damaged cards in the suitcase. Unidentified sticky substances and rubber banded nightmares permeated the case. It was a disaster. The Mark Grant card featured in the picture above, actually had the rubber band dried and stuck to the cardboard. The rubber band crumbled to the touch, but Mark Grant had two lines of dried rubber that weren't easily coming off.
Let this be a lesson, kids. Always take care of your cards!
2 comments:
Those rubber bands look just perspective guides for an art class, leading Mark Grant's eyes to a distant horizon. Keep hope alive, Mark, keep hope alive!
My dad used to tell me about how he glued his cards to pieces of paper before sticking them in a binder... yikes.
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