Author: Melissa Bridwell

There is a certain type of collector that you never see on YouTube. Not any unboxing videos. Not any loud reveals. There is no follow count worth mentioning. They just keep adding up slowly and steadily over years and decades, and by the time anyone notices, what they’re sitting on is truly amazing. That’s the best way to describe the group of collectors that is slowly coming together in New Zealand. There is also at least one person inside with what insiders say is one of the most complete sets of condition-sensitive Pokémon cards in the Southern Hemisphere. The collector…

It’s almost like a scene from a movie: a man walks into a Las Vegas trading card store, sits down, and pretends to look around. He then waits for the store to empty out, and then pulls out a Taser. Gun-free. Not a demand for what’s in a safe. He was going after a glass case with Pokémon cards in it. It sounds like a joke ending. It’s not one. The event was caught on camera at Crossing Las Vegas, a trading card store in the valley. Employees said that a suspect would come and go from the store for…

This trading card of Bell Hooks’s theory is both a study aid and a piece of culture. It’s about the size of a baseball card and has a picture, a short summary of hooks’ main ideas, and some biographical information. It’s the kind of thing you could put in the front pocket of your notebook without giving it a second thought. Most people agree, though, that it is now the most sought-after card in the American academic trading card scene. That’s a unique sentence to write. Also, it’s a really interesting one. The cards come from a project started by…

The math stops making sense somewhere between opening the first pack and looking at what’s left on the table. One hobby box cost you $400 or $500. The hits are good. Nothing out of the ordinary. Someone across the country just took a patch auto-numbered to ten and put it on the market for $2,000 before the box was even opened all the way. That’s how Tier One Football works now, and it’s getting harder to say it was meant to be any other way. Panini’s Tier One Football has always had its own place in the hobby. It’s not…

During every collecting boom, something sells and people stop scrolling. Josh Allen and an Arizona grandmother who was waiting outside of a Mesa card shop before it opened last week owned that moment. Robert Stowers got there an hour early. For her three grandchildren, she wanted a box of 2025 Topps Chrome Football cards. After some time, the 10–12–15-year-old boys opened the box and saw something that neither they nor their grandmother could fully understand at that time: a unique Josh Allen Gold NFL Shield Autograph redemption card. The kind of things that collectors look for years and years. Fans…

It was a big deal when Marshall Fogel’s 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card showed up at the History Colorado Center in Denver during the 2021 MLB All-Star festivities. There were fifteen police officers on motorcycles following the armored car through the city streets. The card was put in a safe, temperature-controlled, UV-protected case that was said to have been used to hold Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. Something about it stops you in your tracks. The same protective glass is used for the president’s Bible and a baseball card. The way people in this hobby treat their rarest items has changed, and…

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist and political theorist who wrote most of his important work while in prison under Mussolini’s rule. The idea that he would end up on a trading card is a little strange. It’s not a textbook. It’s not a syllabus. A small collectible card, the kind you might put in a binder with baseball stats or Pokémon evolutions. But for at least one student, that’s where the introduction took place. The story goes like this: a young woman, who wasn’t sure what she wanted to study as an undergraduate yet, found a theory trading card…

Something about this is almost too good to be true. The most copied academic item on Instagram right now is about the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin spent most of his career thinking about what happens when art is copied and shared over and over again. The card with his picture on it is everywhere. On tables for seminars. Right next to the coffee cups. placed on top of stacks of old paperbacks. Taken pictures, edited, posted, and re-posted. It’s hard not to see the irony in this situation. During his lifetime, Benjamin’s name never quite became as well known…

When you hear that someone has insured their Pokémon card collection for $40 million, there is a point where your brain just won’t work normally. It’s not a fall number like other big ones are. It just stands there, a little silly and demanding to be taken seriously. Still, here we are. A Charizard collection that is being sold for almost $50 million is said to be spread out over five storage lockers, at least three of which were built specifically for security. The owner’s name has been passed around collecting communities with a sense of reverence, but they haven’t…

It starts out small. A card put away in a kitchen drawer after the Sunday barbecue is over. Then another one in June of the next year. Next came a shoebox. Then there were three shoeboxes, and it felt more and more wrong to throw any of them away. This is how most card collections start, but Father’s Day collections are the most important. The history of the holiday is complicated. It was pushed for by Sonora Smart Dodd and other churches and civic groups in Spokane in 1910 as a way to honor her father, who raised six children…