Author: Melissa Bridwell

There’s something about a locked storage locker that makes time stand still. The lock is getting rusty. The number that is written on the door fades. Inside, a collection waits, sometimes for years or even decades, without being seen, touched, or known by anyone who might know what’s there. In Omaha, Nebraska, one of these lockers recently gave up something unexpected: a collection of materials from the Great Depression that most people had forgotten about. The find wasn’t exciting. There were no neon lights, film crew, or dramatic music. A metal door slowly moved up on its hinges, and it…

It’s not very interesting to look at a cardboard box in the garage. It doesn’t happen very often. It gets lost in all the other stuff, between old kitchen appliances and a bag of clothes that were meant to be donated three summers ago. In Tampa, a family almost lost a box like that on a folding table with a handwritten price tag, where strangers were going through their old stuff on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t junk to find inside. Hundreds of Pokémon cards, some of which were still sealed, had been saved up over years. Back then, collecting…

When you don’t stop to think about what it means, a certain kind of stubbornness doesn’t seem heroic. Already, running a small store in Manchester is hard work: you have to work long hours, make small profits, and deal with the usual problems like stock and staffing. There were three armed thefts of the same store, with the same owner and the same shelves of rare Pokémon cards. This makes it harder to explain. It’s not quite defiance. Not really denial. There was something quieter and trickier than both of them. The Manchester store owner at the center of this…

At the beginning of every baseball season, the background noise dies down and a few names start to stand out. It happened April of last year. It took place again this time. This year, that clarity came faster than most people thought it would, thanks to six rookies who didn’t look like rookies at all. For decades, Beckett has been the hobby’s most reliable source of price information. He quickly picked out the group of players to keep an eye on: Chase DeLauter, Munetaka Murakami, Kevin McGonigle, Sal Stewart, Carson Benge, and JJ Wetherholt. Six different people. There are six…

There is a certain type of object that is somewhere between serious and funny. Something that makes you not sure whether to show it off or hide it in a drawer before your coworkers get there. That kind of thing is theory trading cards, which are small, illustrated cards with names like Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, and Michel Foucault on them. They’ve also found their most enthusiastic fans in graduate seminar rooms in the United States, not in the lecture halls of British universities where they were first thought of. The cards were first made by David Gauntlett for his…

When you try to pull off a scam and leave a paper trail with dates and times, you’re being especially stupid. One would think that most con artists know the basics: hide your tracks, tell the truth, and don’t say you got a package two days before it was delivered. Still, people who play Pokémon cards keep meeting people who do just that. A post that went around card-collecting areas of Reddit last year didn’t read much like a complaint and more like a case study. A seller sold a Charizard ex 199/165 Special Illustration Rare from the 151 set.…

Right now, there’s something quietly interesting going on with commercial flights. Before getting comfortable in their seats, passengers are going up to the pilots and asking for trading cards. Not handwriting. Picture-less. Trading cards—with information about planes, facts about history, and pictures of planes that didn’t fly anymore before most of the people who bought them were born. It seems like a small thing. It’s not, though. American Airlines just recently said that starting in May, passengers on some flights will get retro-themed trading cards. The company plans to print millions of them before summer. The cards show all of…

Something about a football card makes you feel safe. Print on cardboard that used to smell a little like pink chewing gum, it’s only two and a half inches wide and maybe three and a quarters of an inch tall. It’s hard to believe that something so simple could win so many bids decades after it was taken out of a penny pack by a kid in Wisconsin who probably just wanted the gum. However, that’s pretty much what’s been happening with some Bart Starr cards, especially those from the Bowman era in the early to mid-1950s. Bowman was Topps’s…

A certain type of obsession only exists in very small groups of people. It never makes the news on a national level, but it’s surprisingly common among those who care. One of those places is the world of trading cards with academic theory on them. Right now, everyone in that niche world is talking about a single Gauntlett card that doesn’t have a number on it. Like most good stories, it starts with something small. David Gauntlett, a media theorist, made a set of twelve digital Theory Trading Cards for his website theory.org.uk around the year 2000. Each one was…

Reading the words “Pokémon Booster Box” and “AK-47-style rifle” in the same police press release seems almost silly. Things are, in fact, just like that in California right now. One small group of people were worried about collectors getting ripped off during sketchy online meetups. Now, this problem has grown so big that law enforcement agencies across the state can’t ignore it any longer. The most talked-about event happened on June 22 in Santa Clara, when police were called to Rivermark Plaza for a robbery. A single, unopened box worth about $13,000, called a Pokémon Booster Box Sun & Moon:…