Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

You know a collector loves his cards when he takes the time to scan each card and comment on it. The PSA Set Registry allows collectors to attach scans and comments to the cards they register, but not many collectors take advantage of this feature.

A couple of collectors’ vintage football sets are worth a look: Wolfbear’s 1962 Fleer set and Frank Evanov’s retired 1964 Philadelphia set. Each collector has provided a description of the set, scans of each card, and comments for each card. (If a comment appears truncated, hold your cursor over it to see the whole thing.) Did you know that Robert Brooks was a “a mahjong enthusiast and an accomplished bassoonist”? I didn’t, either!

One of last week’s posts was about a virtual uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards that I created for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I got some nice feedback on that, so today I created another, this time a virtual 1959 Topps uncut sheet. This one was a little less challenging, since I had a picture of a real sheet to look at, but I still learned a few things. For one, you only have to look at a couple of these to see that a card’s position on the sheet greatly affects its availability in high grade. It’s remarkable that the price guides don’t recognize this. They must know what the sheets looked like, since they know which cards are short prints, but to my knowledge none of the guides consider sheet position when assigning prices.

I’ve never seen a full uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards, so I created a page in the Football Card Gallery that shows what I think an uncut sheet looked like. I’m calling it the Virtual 1960 Fleer Uncut Sheet. To piece it together, I looked at some uncut strips like these and filled in the blanks. The page also shows some wrong-back cards from the set.

Even a non-Redskins fan could spent a couple of hours poking around the Redskins Football Card Museum. My favorite “room” in the museum is the author’s collection of oddball cards, posters, and lids. Many of the items there were new to me, such as the 1972 Gatorade lids pictured here.

The author also keeps a blog, where he chronicles his progress on his collection and the web site. I particularly enjoyed his entry on the technology he used for the site. I intend to come back to it for ideas for my sites!

I gave my nearmintcards.com home page a little sprucing up this week. As usual, it took me twice as long as I expected. Each of the browsers–especially Internet Explorer–has its bugs and quirks, and getting a site to behave well in all of them can be challenging. If you spot something that I broke, please let me know.

I did a search on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and found the site’s humble beginnings. The first records of the site are from June 2002. The Vintage Football Card Gallery came later: its first snapshot is from January 2004. The images on the gallery’s old home page aren’t working, unfortunately, or it would look much as it does today. The links in the left-hand navigation bar still work, though–and so, of course, do the Google ads!

This came in the mail yesterday. I’m so proud! I’m putting it in a place of honor, right behind my Dwight Schrute Bobble Head doll.

Here are my current eBay listings. Bid early and bid often!

I could tell that Jack Kemp had died even before I heard the news. A bunch of his cards suddenly appeared on eBay, and I got a couple of orders for his cards, as well. If I look at the log for my gallery, I’m sure I’ll also see a lot of recent searches there for Jack Kemp cards. I check the logs every week or so, and I can often tell that a player has died by the number of searches for him.

Pictured here is Kemp’s rookie card, the cornerstone of my 1960 Fleer set. I don’t recognize his jersey, though. Many of the players in this set are pictured in their college uniforms, but Kemp doesn’t appear to be in current Occidental colors. Before the Chargers, he also spent time with the Lions, Steelers, Giants, 49ers, and Calgary Stampeders, but I don’t recognize the jersey as being from any of those teams, either. Can anyone help?