Author: Melissa Bridwell

A rectangle of cardboard about the size of a man’s palm can become Exhibit A in a federal lawsuit. It’s almost poetic. Still, here we are—a disputed $1.8 million sale of a Mickey Mantle card is in court, adding a rough legal chapter to one of the most interesting parts of American sports collecting. This disagreement is about a card from the 1952 Topps set, which is a name that serious collectors attach a lot of weight to. People in the hobby tell stories about how many of these cards have been found. Alan Rosen, a dealer from New Jersey…

People who collect sports cards have thought for a long time that Fanatics would eventually just buy Panini. It seemed to make sense. Topps was bought by Fanatics in 2021 for about $500 million. Panini was the only company licensed to make NBA and NFL trading cards, which are two of the most valuable properties in the collecting world. It seemed like the right thing to do to do a buyout, which is a clean form of corporate consolidation that makes the market less chaotic. It didn’t happen that way. Instead, Michael Rubin and Fanatics did something that seems harder…

Pokédex that don’t belong to PSA are stored in a warehouse somewhere. They belong to tens of thousands of collectors who sent them in the mail and are now just waiting. By the middle of 2026, there were almost 10 million cards on that waiting list. A record 2.5 million grades were given by PSA in June alone. And demand still grew faster than that. That part is tough to understand. It wasn’t enough to just record the sound. People don’t talk about PSA like they do other important financial infrastructure, but in the collectibles market, it works like one.…

People who haven’t been to Fanatics Fest can’t really explain the energy that’s there. As they move from table to table, collectors hold cards up to a fluorescent light and talk quietly about printed cardboard pieces that can sell for more than a used car. From the outside, it doesn’t look like a billion-dollar business. But that’s exactly what it has turned into, and the NFL, led by Roger Goodell, wants a much bigger piece of it. This month, Goodell went to Fanatics Fest in New York, and it wasn’t by accident that he was there. There have been more…

In a Pokémon card store in Sydney on a Tuesday night, you’ll find something that doesn’t seem like a high-value deal right away. Pop culture t-shirts and hoodies. Under fluorescent lights, there are long white tables. The low chatter of people who are arguing about which card to play next. It has a casual, almost homey feel to it. But if you look more closely, you can see that something has changed. The cabinets have been strengthened, the cameras have been installed, and motion sensors are blinking near the ceiling. Over the past few months, store owners in Sydney and…

Something about it seems almost silly. In 1914, kids who were too full of sugar pulled cards from snack boxes and sold them at Heritage Auctions’ Winter Sports Card Catalog Auction for a total of $1.38 million. Not a mistake. One hundred forty-four pieces of cardboard, which were first found inside boxes of caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts, have officially changed what collectors thought was possible for a card set from the early 1900s. A 1914 Cracker Jack Ty Cobb card that sold for $516,000 was the main item in the auction. It was the most money ever paid for a…

There’s something memorable about a card show that takes place in a stadium tunnel. There are concrete walls, a low ceiling, and an odd mix of fluorescent lights and display cases for memorabilia. It shouldn’t work as a setting, but it does. Someone had a similar event in a professional stadium last year, and word quickly spread. A lot of collectors came to trade, look, and mostly just be with other people who knew why a 1952 Topps Mantle made someone cry. The whole country didn’t hear about that event. But the pictures did. In just a day or two,…

Most students first learn about David Gauntlett’s ideas through a rough PDF copy of Media, Gender, and Identity that was passed around a seminar group. The person who borrowed the book from the library the week before had marked it up and underlined a lot of important parts. The book is helpful, and it might be one of the easier academic books on media theory to read. However, it’s becoming an old document that talks about a world that doesn’t really exist anymore. That’s what Gauntlett himself said. Still, there is an easy-to-cross bridge between that second edition from 2008…

Walk around the floor of a big card show like Collect-A-Con in Miami and you’ll see things that would have seemed crazy twenty years ago. There were grown adults, many of them smart and financially savvy, studying Pokémon cards with the kind of focused intensity that you usually only see at jewelry auctions. The prices on some of those cards are written in fives. There’s also a good chance that at least one person in that crowd isn’t there to collect. The collectible card market has gone from being a niche hobby for kids to a serious investment space. Along…

If you look closely, a trading card of Theodor Adorno is kind of funny. It’s glossy, collectible, and looks like it should have a batting average or a power ranking. For someone whose career has been spent breaking down the workings of mass culture, this format seems almost on purpose wrong. Still, it works in some way. It works even better than that. The card has been passed around, and the quote on the back is the kind of thing that means different things to different people at different points in their lives. The quote is from a talk Adorno…