Author: Melissa Bridwell

In almost all great stories about storage auctions, someone comes close to leaving. The box almost goes into the trash, but the tin ends up in a donation pile, and history is quietly lost. This almost turned into that, and the fact that it didn’t is what makes it interesting. Seven full boxes of 1986–1987 Fleer basketball cards were found in an Ohio storage unit earlier this year. Details are still pretty sketchy, as they often are in these situations. Not any basketball cards, these are the real deal. In that year’s Fleer set, there is what collectors consider to…

Launching a product is one thing, having a moment is another. It wasn’t because of a heavy marketing campaign that 2025 Topps Cosmic Chrome® Football quickly became the second type. Instead, it was because collectors had been eagerly waiting for months before the first box even came out. Any card shop that had pre-orders open when the allocation started that morning would have seen the same thing happening. People from Phoenix to Pittsburgh would have been refreshing their browsers, calling distributors quickly, and group chats would have been lit up with screenshots of sold-out notices. It’s possible that no one…

A Topps football card has a nostalgic feel to it. For many collectors, the smell of a new pack of cards and the slight resistance before the first card slides out take them back to their childhood. While that was going on, there were no NFL logos, team jerseys, or official branding for almost ten years. Topps was not allowed to get in. That has changed now, in a quiet but important way. The reunion was confirmed earlier this year by the NFL, Fanatics Collectibles (Topps’ parent company), and the NFL Players Association. Topps is back as the league’s only…

It seemed like a happy ending when the last bid reached $16.4 million and confetti began to fall on Logan Paul’s livestream. A guy buys a rare card. Guy gets three times as much for the card when he sells it. Guy makes eight million dollars and breaks the Guinness World Record. Not hard at all. But it’s not. It hasn’t been in a while. PSA graded the card as a perfect 10, making it one of only about 40 known to exist in the world. It was sold by auction house Goldin to Anthony Scaramucci’s son, AJ Scaramucci. Anthony…

Before the numbers start going up quickly, there’s a certain kind of silence in an auction room, or these days, an auction feed. People who have been collecting for a long time know what it is. When the bids first come in, they are slow and almost polite. Then something changes, and all of a sudden, those who said they had a ceiling are shown to be wrong. This is pretty much what happened when a lot of Don Mattingly’s 1984 Donruss rookie card in PSA 10 condition hit the market not long ago. It’s not a new card. People…

The days after a big Topps release are full of a certain kind of energy in hobby shops. It’s not really chaos. This is more like controlled urgency, the kind where someone drives two hours for a box they could have ordered online but didn’t because they can’t stand to wait when the list looks like this. As usual, the 2026 Topps Series 2 Baseball set came out in the middle of the season. It added 350 base cards, a new wave of inserts, and a sense of occasion that’s hard to put into words. Topps has been in the…

The way genuinely helpful educational resources are disregarded is almost ridiculous. Not turned down, but discreetly ignored in favor of whatever is making headlines at the conference that semester. That includes David Gauntlett’s Theory Trading Cards. They were created eighteen years ago for media studies students who needed a quicker, more hands-on way to understand the theorists influencing their field. They were distributed as straightforward printable PDFs. And for some reason, they hardly made an impression on American academics, despite their obvious utility and clarity. After archiving his previous web projects, Gauntlett reposted the cards on his personal website, appearing…

When Mickey Mantle passed away in August 1995, he left behind something most legends don’t: a genuinely complex personal life and an estate that would spend years being pulled in different directions by people who all claimed to have known him best. There was no massive asset or disputed fortune concealed in offshore accounts at the center of the ensuing legal skirmishing. Golf shoes were the first. bathing suits. a brace for the neck. vials of prescription medications. And somewhere in the midst of it all was a collection of baseball cards that turned into a tangible representation of a…

You never come across a particular type of collector on Instagram. No pulls captured in ring light, no unboxing reels, and no subscriber count to boast about. They arrive at the card show, move slowly across the floor, make their purchases in silence, and then depart. That kind has a reputation in Vancouver’s collecting scene, and sometimes it’s a vault that makes more noise than the owner would. The card culture in Vancouver has grown over the years. The Vault Card Show has grown to be one of the most popular collector events in the city, with over 120 vendors…

The fact that the most disputed items in American sports memorabilia are typically the smallest has an almost poetic quality. Barely larger than a business card, this thin cardboard rectangle has sparked more court cases, fraud convictions, and awkward discussions about trust in the hobby than almost any other collectible. One of the rarest finds in the entire trading card world, a Cracker Jack variation of an Honus Wagner card, is currently at the center of a new ownership dispute that the collecting community can’t stop discussing. The lawsuit, which was filed in April on behalf of lead plaintiff Eric…