Author: Melissa Bridwell

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…

Discovering a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card in a flat off the South Circular Road is a little strange. For at least one collector in Dublin, though, that kind of find is nothing out of the ordinary. Today is Tuesday. In Ireland, sports card collecting has grown into a small but dedicated community over the past few years. At the heart of this community is a man who ships American baseball cards over by the crate, and regulars at the Dublin Card Show know him right away. Not by the sleeve or the carefully wrapped single card in a toploader.…

There’s something quietly humbling about getting rid of things from a family home. When you open drawers, you expect to find old receipts and expired coupons. But every once in a while, you find something that stops you in your tracks. In this case, a woman going through her late mother’s things found a worn-out leather album with more than 1,300 trading cards from the late 1800s that had been tucked away and mostly forgotten. She had no idea what she had. A lot of people wouldn’t. She told someone she knew she could trust about it. That part is…

Ralph Ellison’s essays are taught in two different departments at the same time, which is a quiet message. If you go to an American literature class, Shadow and Act might be there with Faulkner as a required reading. The same book shows up again and again in sociology classes that talk about race and identity, but for very different reasons. Most writers don’t do that. It’s a sign that you should stop. Ellison’s book Invisible Man came out in 1952 and won the National Book Award that year. For the rest of his life, people asked him what kind of…

When you’re in a Northern Virginia convention hall with fluorescent lights above you, dealers on all sides, and the low hum of collectors going through binders, all of a sudden you find yourself staring at a 1916 baseball card. It was kind of like that for Rob Chasser at the Chantilly card show at the Dulles Expo Center last year. In this hobby, it’s the kind of moment that people talk about for years. 59-year-old Chasser has played cards long enough to know when something is wrong. He often sets up at shows and has his own store called A…

When a big new set of cards comes out, there’s a certain kind of electricity that goes through collector communities. It’s not built up slowly. It comes all at once, in group chats, on Discord servers, and in eBay listings that are updated every thirty seconds. On June 5, 2026, Topps released the 2025 Signature Class NFL Football Cards. Yeah, that’s what happened. As soon as the boxes hit the secondary market, they started to move in ways that even experienced collectors didn’t expect. The release didn’t come as a complete surprise. Topps gave people a sneak peek at it…

The launch of 2025 Topps Chrome Baseball was meant to be a big deal. It wasn’t. People who are really into this hobby said something that was somewhere between disappointment and a quiet acceptance. Many people said that the rookie checklist, which is the heart of any Chrome release, was one of the weakest they had seen in a while. That’s not a strong opinion. That’s pretty much what everyone agrees on. Still, boxes are selling for $300 each. The market for sports cards seems to be missing something, and collectors with a history in the hobby can feel it…