Author: Melissa Bridwell

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:…

Something incredibly strange about the thought of one of hockey’s holiest items almost going missing into a stranger’s trunk for two dollars. Back in the depths of the Great Depression, a woman whose name no one seems to have thought to write down sold the Howe family a bag full of different things. That plain bag—the kind you wouldn’t think twice about taking to the curb—had Gordie Howe’s first hockey stick inside. This kind of story sounds too good to be true. But the Great Depression made people careless about things they would have been more careful with otherwise. There…

In the best way possible, it’s almost funny. A small test has been going on in American college classrooms, somewhere between a deck of Pokémon cards and a worn-out copy of C. Wright Mills. Professors are giving out trading cards—real, physical cards—with short summaries of decades of critical thought by living and dead sociologists and theorists. It looks like the students are paying attention. It wasn’t a movement at first. At first, it was just a stopgap. Sociology has always had a problem with being hard to get into. The field asks really interesting questions, like why do some people…

A small but important fact is hidden in the history of American sociology. In 1956, the American Sociological Review published a peer-reviewed study that looked into whether card games showed signs of “moral debilitation” in the way American society was set up. After all that research, the main conclusion was that people like to play cards with their friends and family. The study proved what any grandmother at the kitchen table already knew. Now, that moment seems to teach us something. For no reason, this is not a cheap shot at academia. It’s a look into a real issue: the…

A man has spent most of the last twenty years collecting American football cards in a corner of Edinburgh that tourists never really find. It is somewhere between the nice Georgian terraces and the quieter residential streets. Not football the way people in Edinburgh think of it. Not the sport that everyone in Scotland plays on Saturday afternoons, not the game that is played in the rain at Easter Road or Tynecastle. The different kind. The one with the helmets, shoulder pads, and playbooks that are hard to understand. His neighbors knew about it for years. Some of them still…

When it comes to time, an attic is different from the rest of a house. Up there, dust settles in different ways. Light gets through wrong. What looks like a box of old junk can sometimes be something that stops auction house veterans in their tracks. This doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. It was pretty much like that when Karl Kissner went into the attic of his late grandfather in rural Ohio and pulled out a cardboard box tied with a neat bundle of baseball cards from 100 years ago. Almost 700 of them. Not touched since…

One of the binders is in a room with climate control in the suburbs of Ohio. It has Pokémon cards inside that are all sorted by set year and put in rigid toploaders. Together, they are worth more than a year’s college tuition. The owner has home insurance. He is a software engineer in his mid-30s who started collecting as a child and never stopped. He probably doesn’t have enough insurance to cover what’s inside that binder, though. This is a hole that the insurance business has only recently started to pay attention to. For a long time, people thought…