Finding cards at the scale modeling show, again

I've been attending scale model shows since 2001. I had never really found cards at them, with one exception, around 2011. In 2019, I've attended two model shows, and found cards at both of them! (I talked about the first one here) That is a trend I would not mind seeing continue.

This past Saturday, my whole family went to MosquitoCon in Wayne, NJ, which was doubly cool- we don't usually all go, and we met a cousin there for the first time, as we found out- after we had already made plans to go- that he was also a modeler and would be in attendance! That's great stuff.

I was meandering through the vendor room- I also took home 8 models- when I stumbled across a dealer with some cards.

Tobacco cards, in complete set form! I was not able to bring them all home-I really wanted to, but some of them were too expensive for me, so I settled on two sets- 1976's Craven Black Cat Vintage Cars, and 1923's Stephen Mitchell & Son Famous Crosses.

The Vintage Cars set is 50 cards, and the Famous Crosses set is 25 cards. (The second picture I took of the latter set came out too blurry to post) The Vintage Cars set added 14 new brands of car to my collection- a project I will talk more about in some future post I have not even begun to compose yet. Most of the new brands are French cars, which I did not have well represented in my collection. As I've been known to say, the French may have invented the automobile...but the Americans perfected it, LOL.
The Famous Crosses set plays to my love of architecture.

So, that was my unexpected model show card find.

This was probably my favorite model at the show. I am in awe of sailing ships, and the models of them. It's well beyond my skill and knowledge level. (I have no clue where the rigging should go, and these ships have a lot of it!)

This was a fun one, too!

If you want to see all 454 photos I took at the show, you can see them on my main website HERE. I have two more model shows this month, I would be surprised if I find any more cards...but I can hope! I never expected to find them at these two, so you never know.

Commishioning a post for my oldest card!

A few posts back CommishBob of The Five Tool Collector said he was going to send me something, and when he did...I was shocked speechless. As you may have gathered that doesn't happen too often...First thing I saw in the box was a bubble mailer sealed up inside...that should have been a clue to the specialness of what was inside but I was too dense to know it, I set that aside and peeked underneath to see what was there; I first saw 4 diecast NASCAR cars, a 500 count white box and a box with a picture of Elvin Hayes on it...all great stuff.

Then I opened the envelope...

Holy mackerel!  On the right is a card from 1890 Duke's Holidays, the set I bought half a card of on the COMC Black Friday sale...this one has some paper loss but most of the back is there, enough to consider it a complete card in my collection.

On the left is a card from 1889! It's from the Kinney Brothers Novelties set, (N228) and depicts what is now an ancient camera, but would have been the style at the time, along with a drawing of who I think is just some random woman, although I'm not really up on my 1880s celebrities. It's also die cut, which is a concept I had no idea existed that far back in history! The earliest die cut cards I had seen before this were...Hmm, just thinking about it...1990? More than 100 years after this card was created! I still have so much to learn about non-sports cards, but I love to learn this kind of stuff.

Bob, I can't thank you enough! I truly can't put into words what this meant to me!

As if that wasn't enough, there was also this cool bobble head of NBA Legend Elvin Hayes.
He didn't quite survive the trip as his right leg broke in two places and his left in one, but I was able to use my modeling skills/supplies to fix him up good as new. As it turned out, the box they used is slightly too small and it was probably the packing at the factory that caused the issue instead of the USPS. It's only the 2nd bobblehead in my collection, joining a Kevin Garnett one Upper Deck included in a box of 2001-02 UD Playmakers Limited. My mom has two Jason Kidd examples, including the one Angus sent me a few weeks ago, lol.

This is a crappy picture- too much stuff is visible in the background, and the power cord for my phone is in it. when I get my photo studio set up again (soon!) I'll take a better photo. This is one of the very, very few- maybe only- items in my collection to show the home San Diego Rockets in full color. When I do the Rockets' Uniform History post you may see the studio photo  then since I can't think of any cards that show it in full and in color.

The box of cards, which was mostly NASCAR but included a couple of Multi-Sport cards, some NBA and one hockey, was mostly all 1990s...my favorite era. Mid 1990s at that! 1994 is my favorite year for NASCAR cards and I would guess more than half of them are from the 1994 season.

There was also one that totally stumped me at the bottom...a big chrome DW. I've never seen this design ever before, so I will need to do some research on this one!

I have not listed all the cards yet so I can't say exactly which ones or how many were new but I know it's a lot.

Here are the diecasts.  I have a very extensive collection from the 1990s but he still managed to send me one I didn't have, the Jeff Gordon Pepsi is new to me. The two Earnhardts are technically new as well- they have a "Value Pack- not for individual sale" sticker over the bar code on the back which technically makes them a variation. I will be glad to add them to my collection! The Labonte/Gibbs Football Hall of Fame car is a duplicate, but may be a conditional upgrade or might even be a variation, I've been too busy to pull up my collection photos and check...luckily, my diecast collection is fully photodocumented.

Sorry this second photo is a little out of focus. I'm still learning the perspective with my smart phone...

Thanks again Bob! I am pretty darn shocked here and even stunned speechless, something that like I said above, does not happen very often at all!

Hot Off the Scanner Tray Week 18

(I normally post these only on Sundays, but I was not able to this week...so here it is on Tuesday!)

Hard to believe it will be May by the time I post this. 2016 is just flying by!

After I pulled a patch from 2015-16 Threads, I was asked on Facebook what it sells for. I truly couldn't care less (It will be in my collection forever) but I did take a look on Ebay...and saw this one for sale. Amazingly, I got it for roughly $10!

Picked up three Star cards locally. I don't like to buy loose Star cards not in team bag form, but I will if I come across them...
this one is my first card of Wallace Bryant. He only ever got two.

Remember when Phone Cards were a "thing", before the rise of cell phones?

This is a $10 phone card from 1997 Racing IQ, a set that was always hard to find. It's SN3720 on the back...one of the earliest examples of SN in NASCAR. It's never been scratched off, and never will be.

A local dealer had two Star Rubies from 1996-97 Skybox in his boxes. Now I have two (more) Star Rubies in my collection. I now have both Ruben Nembhard cards ever made in my collection- the base card and the Star Ruby are it. He's not a guy I know a whole lot about, but Wikipedia says he is still playing in Venezuela. Good for him....lots of players who don't make it in the NBA find long career overseas and it sounds like he is one of them. I was a huge Jazz fan in 1996-97, (up through the Stockton & Malone era's end) but I can't say I remember seeing him play. It may be that I didn't, or it may be I just don't remember. 1996 was 20 years ago, after all.

I really love Tobacco era cards. .

I got 11 more I could not fit onto the page, and three duplicates. They range in age from 1913 to 1939, although the card from 1913 did not make it onto this scan. They have all been cropped and posted to the Database. I will have some retroactive additions I need to make to the Sets in my Collection project! I got my first 4 Cricket cards. That's a sport I know almost nothing about.

Here is a cool card from 2009-10 Topps...

 Marc Gasol, subject of the card, is being guarded by Pau Gasol, his older brother- and the player he was traded for!

I finished the round of card cases on 4/28, and then sorted them, and began typing them in on 4/29. There probably won't be a HOST next week because it usually takes me a week to type them in, and when I'm working on the typing, I don't scan anything until I finish. The typing them in part is one of my favorite things to do so while it is a lot of work it's highly enjoyable- although this round is mostly made up of a handful of sets so it isn't as fun as it is when it's all kinds of various sets with no real rhyme or reason- and the next batch looks like be much of the same. That's not to say it's not very, very fun.

 You can really tell when I took the time to do both years of Topps Heritage!

Hot off the Scanner Tray "Week" 15

HOST is back and this time should last as I have no series or other projects to displace it. Of course I don't have the greatest track record with follow-through so only time will tell I suppose!

I start with some new additions from SportLots...I finally figured out how the site works, for the most part, and I'm having fun with it for sure.

This is my first patch from the Nets in the Brooklyn era! Bonus, it's SN1 of 25, extra bonus, it's also his jersey number!

This was labeled as a patch, but it's not really. I don't dislike manufactured patches, but it shouldn't be marketed as a patch I don't think. Who cares about semantics though, this is a great card no matter what you call it.

This one didn't even have a picture on Sportlots but I didn't care about that. It's my first from 2013-14 Timeless Treasures.

I think my favorite additions from SportLots, though, had to be something from the Non-Sports side. I won two lots of some old tobacco cards, and while I am only sharing one card from each, I got more than one card from each set. Yes, it's true that they are not all in good shape, but for the price I paid...you can't argue. (50 cents combined!) Eventually I will need to do a Sets in My Collection post for three of them, one of them already has a post, I think. I can't even remember!

1912 Wills Arms of Foreign Cities, with metallic silver print!

1913 Wills Arms of Companies

1923 Wills Wild Flowers

1929 Player Hidden Beauties- one of the few Tobacco era sets I previously had in my collection,

I bought a full 550 count box for $15 on the Hot Spot Facebook group, and it was a mystery of what was going to be in it. I prefer it that way. I completed 2013-14 Prestige, which is only my second completed set of the Panini era- (2009-10 to current) and interestingly enough both are 2013-14 season issues.
In the box was one new set to my collection, 2015-16 Absolute Basketball. This wasn't my first card, but I had to scan this one...I don't enjoy scanning mirror foils so I set most of them aside for later.

As I was working on my non-sports card duplicates to post to my tradelist on the Database, I realized that I still had some car cards that I had no posted yet, so I got them out and did them.

The Famous Hot Rods set may be the worst designed ever.

ALL the cards have black backgrounds, including the cars that are painted black. They also appear to have been photographed mostly at night.

Even those photographed during the day, like this one below, are photographed with the sun behind the car- terrible for photography. I've taken more than 10,000 car photos and I always try to make sure the sun is not behind the car- it should be over the photographer's shoulder or, ideally, directly above.

This is an example of my automotive photography, for what it's worth-

Note that the car, which is also red, has the sun above and behind it and you can still see all the important details....I don't know what the card company was thinking or doing...but it may be why the cards are labeled as Series 1 and no series 2 ever happened.

Since the last post I made on Cardboard History, I joined the SportsCardForum message board. It's the spiritual successor to Trader Retreat, where I was very active in the early 2000s, even winning Member of the Month on at least two locations. (Sure wish I knew how to use the Print Screen feature back then, so I could have saved an image of my awards). In just about a week's time I have made two trades already, with one of them going all the way to Slovenia! We got talking and are now making the trade into a larger one but it's pretty cool to be trading again. It really makes me wish I could find the majority of my trade stash, though. A lot of it went missing when I was away from the NBA from 2006-12.

I also got Cardboard History to be an affiliate...hopefully that will get me some new readers. It's not easy to attract new readers when you aren't mostly about baseball, that's for sure. (There will be a baseball post later this week, would have been today but I wanted to get HOST going again) You will now find a link to my profile on SportsCardForum on the right side, above the blogroll.

During the month of March I prepped and posted- or at the very least saw that somebody else posted- exactly 3700 cards to the Trading Card Database. That is my new personal record since I started keeping track of what I do in a month, the previous record being 2958 in June 2014. I only began doing it this way in January 2014, where I keep everything I process to the Database in a big file and then upload it to my own website on the 1st of every month, then putting each card image in it's proper album. It's fun for me to do that and somehow I managed to get all 3700 uploaded on the 1st of April. In 2013 I put everything I processed during the entire year into one big album and then uploaded it all on January 1st...it took me several days to do and I decided to do something differently in 2014, and have kept at it. Sometimes I do a lot, sometimes I do a little, my record low is only 158 cards, in February 2015.
April is going to be big as well, as I'm processing all of the cards I had scanned and not yet posted. My "To be posted" folder had gotten to around 10,000 scans...I decided it was enough that I should start posting. I have it down to 4840 right now....they upload a lot faster than they scan. I'll never be able to get it down to 0 because there are too many cards I just can't find checklists for- some I can't even ID the set on.

Sets in my Collection #8 - 1929 Player's Hidden Beauties

I have been slacking on posting my Sets in my collection. Today is October 15th and I've only done one so far this month! I have not been really motivated to write too much- and it shows. I have so many things I want to write about- just getting the motivation to do it is not always easy. I sat looking at a blank white screen before I decided if I wanted to post in the Sets series, or start a new series I have been slowly working up to that will require a lot more work on my end, and lots of research, but the research involves looking at lots of cards, so it's not unenjoyable. In the end I realized I didn't have the motivation to do a large post, so a Sets post it is. It's already Thursday and I haven't even started this week's roundup Hot off the Scanner Tray yet...

Anyway...

Set #8 is from 1929, and was issued by Player, a major British tobacco firm.

I received this card as a gift from a member of the Non-Sports forum several years back, after I posted that my main goal was to get a tobacco card. I just stopped posting on all the forums at the conclusion of 2013, and I have not been back since. I really should go back to some- I do miss some of them. (It isn't just blog posting I have trouble maintaining).

The set is 25 cards, tobacco standard size. I have only this one card.

Each card highlights something microscopic, a cool concept for a card set that worked in the early days but wouldn't get off the drawing board now- perhaps as an insert in Allen & Ginter but it's own standalone set? Not a chance.