R.I.P. My LCS

As of today my LCS has closed its doors for good.


I managed to make it in for one last browse through his collection of singles and to say farewell to a store that has seen a handful of owners and two different locations.

I started collecting seriously back in 1988, took a break in 1997 and returned to the hobby in 2008. This has been the only store I frequented in my hometown. I will never shop at the only option left.

Thank-you very much Jim, who started the store and thank-you very much Glynn for your incredible and undeserved over-the-top kindness for the last, almost, two years. As a fitting exit I cleaned him out of his remaining four packs of Topps Series 2 Baseball.

Not sure I want to rip them......call me a sentimentalist.


P.S. - Thanks for the sweet deal on the Sandman #1 issue. Lord knows I spent enough time staring at it every time I came in.


Cheers,

LFB2B Premiere Group Break - 2010 Allen & Ginter

A few posts back I had made a passing mention that my Local Card Store will be closing its doors for good soon. This leaves me with one supplier in town who I refuse to deal with simply because he is quite the douche-bag. The next closest stores are 45 minutes to the south of me and one relatively "close" only because it is in the same city where I work, but still 40 minutes away.

One of the things I have been doing for the past while is trying to find a new place to purchase boxes of cards without paying ridiculous prices forced upon store owners by their suppliers. I think I have succeeded in securing a place. After sharing several conversations back and forth with a great guy named Joey, I have also decided to try and work with this new outlet and make them the "official" supplier of cards to LFB2B.

I am extremely happy to welcome 'Canadian Card World' to LFB2B and hopefully introduce a few of you to them. I have been spending a great deal of time at their website reading articles and posts from other collectors. I check out their blog two or three times a week and I have also been following their Twitter feed. You will also notice that I added a banner to their website on the right side of my blog page.

I want to try and take my blog to the next level and offer baseball card collectors, hopefully attracting Canadian collectors, a place where they can meet each other and continue to build a solid network like the ones I have seen amongst our American friends. As part of this next step I want to begin offering Group Breaks. If I am like everyone else out there, I thoroughly enjoy Group Breaks but I also never seem to get in on enough of them.

I figure what could one more hurt, right?

Quite a while ago a few of the Bloggers that currently host Group Breaks were kind enough to share their experiences with me and offer their advice and warnings. Their words of encouragement meant the most and helped me make the decision to pursue this offering.

With the heavy anticipation of the 2010 Allen & Ginter release on the horizon I figured, "What a great way to kick off offering Group Breaks?!" I also though I needed to kick this off with a BIG event, so, the first Group Break at LFB2B will be a case break of 2010 Allen & Ginter.

12 boxes of retro-themed baseball card goodness

The Group Break slots will be team-based. I have figured out the costs and the slots will be 45$ each with additional slots costing 40$ in Canadian funds. I am fine-tuning the distribution of the non-sport cards in the set and will post the complete breakdown of everything this weekend, along with a post allowing you to claim teams.

I am looking forward with excitement about being able to offer another avenue for people to get a hold of cards from their favorite players and favorite teams. If you have any suggestions that you would like to offer I am open to them. I look forward to everyone being a part of this and I look forward to this being the beginning of something truly great.

Cheers,

The Joy of the Completed.....ummmm....Sub-set...I guess!?!

Yesterday brought with it an opportunity to stop in to my LCS and have a browse through the endless shoeboxes of singles, trying to whittle away at some want lists. The urgency of doing such things has been heightened ever since I found out that my LCS will be closing its doors in the near future. On one hand this is completely understandable given the current state of the hobby and the difficulties "brick and mortar" stores face trying to survive. On the other hand I think we are due for some kind of resurgence in the hobby in the next few years, provided some things change. Anyway, in the end I brought home a large stack of cards belonging to several sets I am working on, plus a pile of stuff from the 25-cent box.

Last year, while waiting for Baseball to become relevant again I decided to try my hand at putting together a Football card set. You can read all about it here. I knocked off a few more singles and inserts from my want list including these two cards from the 'Worlds Fair' insert set, highlighting the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

WF2 - 1893 Chicago World's Fair

WF11 - Eadweard Muybridge

I know that the established premise of this type of post is to be "The Joy of the Completed Page", however, seeing as these cards are the same size as the original Mayo tobacco cards they do not fit into the tobacco sleeve pages. The only way to store them is in the tobacco card top-loaders. Now that the set is complete you can sit back and enjoy a little cardboard history lesson as well as check out some truly cool cards.

The 1893 Chicago World's Fair was held to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus discovering the New World. This 14-card set highlights some of the people and events that gave this World's Fair its significance.

Eadweard Muybridge was a photographer who would come to be known as a pioneer in the development of motion pictures. His exhibit at the worlds fair showed off his "zoopraxiscope" technology, technically creating America's first movie theatre, predating what we term today to be motion pictures.



George Ferris debuted his 260-foot tall invention at the World's Fair. The cost to ride was $0.50 and the ride lasted for 20 minutes. Total number of people to ride the Ferris Wheel was 1.5 million.






The Court of Honor housed all the main buildings that were designed for the World's Fair. The statue pictured stood 65-feet tall, overlooking the Grand Basin.

Despite not being given an official place at the World's Fair, Buffalo Bill Cody set up his Wild West show just outside the Fair which included his famous re-creation of Custer's Last Stand.






Due to the exterior of the buildings being white stucco and the illumination provided by powered street lamps at night, the buildings in the Court of Honor shone brightly and became known as 'The White City'

One of the more prominent displays at the Fair was electricity. Thomas Edison and General Electric had originally bid for the contract to provide the electricity to the World's Fair. They were outbid by a fellow Fair attendee and a card subject later in this set.

Having no sense of the importance of its architecture I will not even try to fake it. All I know is that over 18 million people visited it and it was made entirely of materials native to the area.

The John Bull Locomotive was brought out of retirement by The Smithsonian Institute to make a self-powered trip to the World's Fair. On its 150th birthday (in 1981) The Smithsonian fired up its engines once again, making it the oldest running steam engine in history.

As the partner of George Westinghouse and the main competitor to Thomas Edison and General Electric, Nikola Tesla's more efficient alternating current electricity won the bid to power the 1893 World's Fair.

The 'Viking' was a replica of a 9th Century Viking ship called 'The Gokstad' that was excavated 13 years prior to the World's Fair. The ship itself sailed across the Atlantic, from Norway, to participate in the Fair.



As far as I am concerned, THIS is the best card of the set. Totally scooping Allen & Ginter (as far as I know) we have the first trading card of The Hamburger!!! This staple of any carnivore's diet made its public debut in 1893.

Scott Joplin was known as 'The King of Ragtime' and at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair he introduced the world to Ragtime music and subsequently the entire Chicago music scene. If you love music then you need to read about Scott Joplin here.

Frederick Law Olmstead was essentially the creator of the 1893 World's Fair. It was his design and his vision that led to all of the amazing buildings that housed the World's Fair. His work as a landscape designer included New York's Central Park, Stamford University and the University of Chicago.

I have many more singles to show off from the LCS trip and will be doing so over the next few posts. Also, I have to catch up on some generous mailings from fellow bloggers.

Having gone back over this set it truly reinforces my love of history and how card manufacturers can succeed in a product if enough care and thought is put into a historical set. I am three cards away from the 'Celebrated Citizens' collection from the same release. Once I complete it, I will definitely share with you.

Cheers,

Saturday at the LCS

This Saturday provided me with one of the rare opportunities to devote a substantial amount of time to soring out my collection and cataloguing a few more things that have come out of storage. Of course, it also afforded me an opportunity to visit my local card store as well. Usually I limit visits to during the week and they only last long enough to grab a few random packs and place orders for future product. Today I actually had a chance to thumb through several shoeboxes of singles and the ever-present $1 box, chat with the owner and customers about collecting and basically just hang out.

Armed with a couple wantlists for some of the sets I am working on I wound up with a large number of singles to sort out later. Some of the other, more interesting bounty worth sharing that I came home with helped get me closer to completing some insert sets and started me working on a few more collections.

Having decided not to bother with 2010 Topps Heritage this year has made building the insert sets a bit more difficult to say the least, but I still managed to pick up a few. Three 'Baseball Flashback' inserts featuring Luis Aparicio, Warren Spahn and Roger Maris. Two 'Then & Now' inserts featuring Roger Maris/Albert Pujols and Luis Aparicio/Jacoby Ellsbury and 1 'News Flashback' insert featuring Mohammed Hassan II.


I also picked up 4 of 10 base set cards that will make a nice stand alone sub-set. Cards #'d 401-410 parallel the 'Baseball Thrills' cards from the original '61 set. However, three of the cards' subjects differ from the original set, the others are the same except the Mantle (card #406) is featured with a different photo. Here are the four I picked up today paired with their 1961 counterparts.

2010 Topps Heritage #403 (left)
1961 Topps #403 (right)

2010 Topps Heritage #406 (left)
1961 Topps #406 (right)

2010 Topps Heritage #408 (left)
1961 Topps #408 (right)

2010 Topps Heritage #410 (left)
1961 Topps #410 (right)

Either way it matters to me very little, the only card that might have been better to have in the set was Larsen's Perfect Game but in the end it is still a cool looking page of cards when finished. Hopefully someday I will put together the 1961 set of these 10 cards as well. The last Heritage purchase was a chrome Adam Lind card to go towards this years crop of Blue Jays I will be collecting.


Amongst a handful of base cards for Topps Series 1 I snagged a few inserts too, including a gracious and welcoming Derrek Lee, a card I was never lucky enough to own in the first place let alone risk my mother throwing it out, and a card commemorating THE event in Baseball Card History.


While searching through several unmarked shoeboxes of cards I came across some 2009-10 Upper Deck Champs Hockey minis. When this set first came out it was still fairly early on in my return to collecting and so my sights were set more on reacquainting myself with the hobby and trying not to get overwhelmed by too much product. I ignored this release at the time but some of the sub-set cards were interesting. I found these five cards and decided to try and eventually find the rest.


I wanted to make sure that before I left I would take a trip through the dollar box. Seeing the success that some of the other bloggers have had with "bargain bin" cards I had the itch now. Nothing really amazing to find but a few cards that peaked my interest came home with me. I have gathered a few of the 'Topps 50th Anniversary' Reprints from several sources and added a couple more here.


The Ryne Sandberg 'Spirit of the Game' was just to fill a hole in that player collection. The Heritage mini red-back and the T-205 mini were the first pick-up in what will, more than likely, become a bigger collection someday.


All things considered it felt really good to be able to hang out in the card store and get back to one of the aspects of collecting that makes it fun for me. When you get to gather with other collectors, talk about your collection and listen to others talk about theirs, it reinforces why you do this in the first place. Hopefully I can start to make these Saturday visits a regular occurrence, it sure does the soul some good.

Cheers,