Adventures in Card Dealing

2013 Goals for the Vintage Football Card Gallery

December 31st, 2012  |  Published in Adventures in Card Dealing

Happy Feller 1973 Topps football cardHappy New Year, everyone! So, what are your hobby goals and resolutions for 2013?

My main goal for the year is to dedicate more time to my Vintage Football Card Gallery. I enjoy selling cards, of course, but I enjoy working on the gallery more, so naturally that’s where I would like to spend my time. In 2013 I plan to add more obscure sets, add more trivia about the cards and players, and create more special pages like my vintage football card wrappers page and Heisman Trophy candidates page.

You can help, and it’s absolutely free!

  1. Tell your friends about the Gallery–not just your card collecting friends, but anyone who loves football. What football fan wouldn’t enjoy browsing through old cards of his or her favorite pro or college team?
  2. If you’re a Facebook or Google+ user, be sure to “like” or “+1” your favorite pages and blog articles. There are Facebook and Google+ buttons on the bottom of each page. (Idea: go back and do it right after you finish this article!)
  3. If you have a web site or blog of your own, add links from your site to your favorite pages in the Gallery.
  4. If you use an image or two from the Gallery on a message board, etc., please add a link back to the page where you found the image. (Please extend this courtesy to other publishers, as well. Give credit where it’s due, right?)
  5. Last but not least, be sure to support the Gallery’s sponsors. I get a little ad revenue from the Gallery, and the better I do on ads, the more time I can spend working on the site.

From me, Happy Feller, and the football card All-Party Team, have a happy and safe New Year!

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Sports Card Deja Vu

July 21st, 2009  |  Published in Adventures in Card Dealing, General Collecting Info

A customer once bought a Lions team card from me because his friend played for the Lions the year the card was printed. Unfortunately, his friend wasn’t in the picture, and the customer got upset. What he didn’t realize is that the card companies would use the same photos year after year, and the photo on his team card was an old one. I explained and offered a refund, but I didn’t hear back from him.

Here are the cards I used to demonstrate to him that I wasn’t making it up. The Philadelphia Gum Company used the same image of Mick Tingelhoff in 1964, 1965, and 1967. (They used a different image in 1966, but it wasn’t as good as this one.) If you browse through the Football Card Gallery, you can find many more instances where the card companies reused photos. Joe Namath is another good example: look for the Band-Aid on his head in cards from 1968 through 1970.

Sometimes the companies would even recolor the player’s uniform if he happened to change teams. John Henry Johnson’s 1957 Topps card, which I showed in an earlier post, is a great example–though in this case, Topps got John Henry’s new team wrong.

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The Team’s Effect on Card Value

June 16th, 2009  |  Published in Adventures in Card Dealing, General Collecting Info

In previous posts and in some of my uncut sheet pages, I’ve noted bits of conventional wisdom that the price guides employ that don’t hold up in practice. For example, the price guides assign a premium to the first and last cards in a set, because presumably those cards got more wear and tear from being on the top and bottom of kids’ stacks. In practice, I don’t find the first and last cards of a set to be scarcer in high grade than the rest, unless they happened to be on the corner of the sheet before it was cut into individual cards. See my 1959 virtual uncut sheet page for some discussion on this.

The guides sometimes also price short prints much higher than they should. See the 1963 Fleer uncut sheet page for examples of this. They even get entire series wrong. For example, the guides price 1961 Fleer and 1961 Topps second series football cards higher than first series cards, but the second series cards in both sets are actually more plentiful.

On the other hand, we can see that a card’s position on a sheet often affects its availability in high grade. Apparently, cards on the corners and edges of the uncut sheets were often damaged in printing and processing. The price guides don’t appear to acknowledge this, even when the guide has an accompanying population report showing that some cards are much scarcer than others.

What other factors affect a card’s value that the price guides don’t consider? The player’s team comes to mind. I find that Packers, Raiders, and Cowboys cards in general will fetch more than vintage cards from the other teams. I assume that this is because these teams have more of a national following: the Packers’ long tradition, the Raiders’ bad-boy image, and the Cowboys’ “America’s Team” label have made them popular outside their regions. Their success in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when a lot of vintage cards were printed, made their players more recognizable, as well.

Conversely, vintage cards from some teams sell poorly compared to others, and thus do not command as high a price. Cards of Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals, for example, don’t sell as well as cards from other teams. Except for the Oilers’ early AFL days, these teams had limited success in the 60’s and 70’s, and both teams have moved since their vintage cards were printed.

The price guides assign these cards the same value. I’ll take the Jeter.

A lot of people treat their price guide as Gospel, as if the guide should dictate card values, rather than the other way around. In reality, the price guides are very rough: they assign value to factors they shouldn’t, they don’t acknowledge factors they should, and they don’t keep up with the market–even after years. Sure, consult your price guide when buying, but don’t use it as your only source when determining value.

eBay is one place to consult when estimating a card’s current value. You need to look at completed auctions, though, not current ones. See my page on sports card values for instructions on finding completed eBay auctions for your cards.

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Jack Kemp, Chargers and Bills Quarterback

May 4th, 2009  |  Published in Adventures in Card Dealing, My Collection, Player Deaths

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?

 

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Pre-Rookie Cards

February 27th, 2009  |  Published in Adventures in Card Dealing, Football Card Trivia, New in the Gallery

Awhile back, a collector called to ask if I had any 1962 Post Cereal cards, because he was interested in the Bob Lilly card from that set. He said he collected pre-rookie cards of hall-of-famers, and that the 1962 Post Lilly was one he still needed. An interesting idea, I thought.

Today I added a page to the gallery that highlights a few pre-rookie cards. I included a few well-known players that aren’t in the hall of fame, in part because I wanted to include a few 1961 Nu-Cards. The Nu-Card set is one of the few vintage college sets, and it contains cards of a lot players who went on to play in the NFL and AFL.

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