Author: Melissa Bridwell

There’s a certain kind of quiet that settles over a room when something truly old changes hands for an amount of money that doesn’t quite feel real. That sums up what the sports collecting community has been dealing with ever since the “Lucky 7” story entered the public eye and continued to get stranger. Somewhere in the rural South, seven identical, over a century-old Ty Cobb baseball cards were discovered facedown in a torn paper bag on the floor of a dilapidated home. A family was sorting through the belongings of their late great-grandparents. Beneath postcards and other papers, beneath…

There is a particular kind of irony in the fact that bell hooks — a woman who spent decades writing about bringing ideas from the margin to the center — spent much of her intellectual life tucked into the margins of academic papers. Literally. A citation. A footnote. A name dropped in the third paragraph of a thesis no one outside a seminar room would read. And then someone put her on a trading card. It sounds trivial. It sounds like a gimmick, the kind of thing you might find next to tote bags and refrigerator magnets with quotes about…

Right now, a graduate student’s desk in a sociology department has a stack of trading cards. Each one has a face on it — Bourdieu, Foucault, maybe Weber if someone was feeling ambitious — and a few cryptic numbers that suggest strengths, weaknesses, something. Nobody quite knows the rules. These were purchased by someone while they were a graduate student, and now the entire department is laughing at each other’s theories as if they were debating whether or not a defensive midfielder should be in the starting lineup. It sounds like a joke. It is, in a sense. But the…

Mark Li had no idea that a card would be sprayed with pepper. He was merely attempting to sell two pieces of cardstock through Facebook Marketplace outside a Burnaby, British Columbia, home. Of course, the cardstock was worth about $20,000. The meeting appeared to be standard. After confirming the authenticity of the cards, one of the buyers turned to his partner and said, “Get him.” Li took hold of one of them, held on for a moment, and then lost sight. He stood there, blinded, as the suspects vanished with his cards. What came next was more than a police…

The first thing you notice when you enter the Atlantic City Convention Center during the week of the National Sports Collectors Convention is the sound. This is not the typical noise from the casino floor across the street. It’s the steady, low hum of thousands of cardboard-related conversations. Before the doors open, dealers unroll display cases. Collectors with printed want lists in their hands. Thirty people were in line before ten in the morning as a former All-Star signed autographs at a folding table. The National Sports Collectors Convention, or simply “The National,” was founded in 1980 in a hotel…

Some people attend auction houses with no intention of losing. One of them seems to be Thomas Fish, president of Blowoutcards.com. Fish won a record-breaking $360,000 for a Pokémon First Edition Base Set Sealed Booster Box, a 1999 Wizards of the Coast production still in its original shrinkwrap, at Heritage Auctions’ Comics and Comic Art sale, which took place over three days in late November. Just two months prior, in September 2020, at Heritage Auctions, the previous world record was set at $198,000. Fish didn’t simply outperform it. He almost doubled it. This is especially noteworthy because, even before the…

The notion that a laminated card could introduce an undergraduate to one of the most challenging thinkers of the twentieth century—a man who once wrote that there is no right life within a wrong world—is almost comical. However, that is essentially what took place. Theodor Adorno became teachable somewhere between the survey courses of American liberal arts colleges and the lecture halls of British universities. A British professor who has had a quiet, consistent, and genuinely underappreciated impact on humanities departments in the United States is primarily to blame for that change. Adorno was not a simple person. Born in…

There’s something about entering a card show in a mall that eliminates any sense of grandeur. Not a convention center. No parking structures costing forty dollars. All that was present were folding tables, plastic sleeves, and a large number of people who genuinely cared. That’s what makes the Crossroads Mall Card Show feel more like a neighborhood get-together with rare cardboard than a trade show. It’s difficult to ignore the variety of attendees. A teenager looking through binder pages with the attention of a lawyer. Holding a graded slab up to the fluorescent light is a middle-aged collector wearing a…

A teenager who makes more money from trading cards than his parents do from full-time employment is quietly remarkable. Not spectacular or eye-catching. It’s the kind of thing that causes you to pause and consider how the world is changing beneath everyone’s feet. That is precisely what has been taking place in Perth, Western Australia. A local teenager who is still in high school and living at home has established a Pokémon card company that, by most accounts, brings in more money each month than either of his parents. Ambition wasn’t the beginning of it. It began with cards strewn…

There is a certain type of anxiety that permeates every sports card show these days. Collectors squint at corners and surface texture, lean in close over tables, take out loupe magnifiers, and tilt cards under the light at strange angles. To some extent, they have always done this. However, it now has a benefit that wasn’t present a few years ago. Everyone in the hobby seems to know someone who was burned, and the problem of counterfeit goods has gotten worse. That reality is beginning to be reflected in the lawsuits. Counterfeit NFL rookie cards sold through online marketplaces are…