Puzzling Evidence

There are several trends swirling in this thing of ours right now and they aren’t all in alignment.

One trend I see is that dealers are absolutely drowning in all sorts of vintage material, not just cards, so much so that it is slowing the pace of sales at the wholesale level. I have a thesis for the glut: we are at the start of a changing of the guard in the paper ephemera hobby. It is the Boomers. The biggest generation in American history was also the most prosperous and accumulative and it is dying off and overwhelming the capacity of the collectible system to redistribute the riches. Every long-running show I attend, it seems that there is at least one vacant table due to severe illness or death among the Boomer dealers who’ve been at the shows for decades, guys with massive inventories (really hoards) of stuff that are going to hit the market when they hit the dirt. Last month was no different. A collector I know ran into me at a paper fair and told me that one of the best picker booth operators with a seemingly bottomless inventory of interesting stuff had dropped dead since the last show. Of course, our thoughts and prayers go out…to where his inventory went. Yeah, I said it. Show me a dead dealer and I will show you sharks like me swimming lazy circles around the estate waiting for the heirs to clean it out.

The silver tsunami of bric-a-brac that the Boomers are leaving behind as they move into assisted living, skilled nursing and the boneyards isn’t great timing for me as an early Gen X’er. I’ve been preparing to vacate an office I’ve rented for nearly 30 years and clearing out my stash has been both a major pain in the ass and revelatory. Like anyone dealing in this space, I tend to overbuy. Hey, you never know what you will find so best to buy the whole damn collection than to pass on a diamond in the rough. Also, like anyone in this space, I have a packrat tendency to keep it all because you never know whether what you are throwing away might have value (someone wants vg condition 1979 Topps commons, they’re out there…I can feel it). I used my office to store all the excess stuff. In the process, I kind of forgot that the reason why diamonds are coveted is that they are rare. You gotta dig through a lot of mine tailings to find them.

My usual routine is to buy and store it all, then go through it in detail to pull the valuable items over time. When I finish processing my bulk purchases and cull out what is useful to me, I try to sell the remains. Even with that discipline, I am inevitably overweight on stuff. For 2025, that consists of six crates of played out cardboard and paper ‘mine tailings’ that I have not been able to offload to larger dealers, meaning that this year, for the first time ever, I am stuck with unsellable junk. I sold some of my crates but my usual buy-it-all guys rejected most of the bulk at any price because they’ve got fresher pickings from Boomer carcasses to process.

It doesn’t help that some collectibles are just about dead. Besides the flea market picking that I’ve mentioned before (ad nauseum?), I attend vintage paper fairs, antique shows and postcard shows. Really, any event I find that has the promise of old cardboard. I find the variety of things fascinating and as alien to my thoughts on what has value as pieces of cardboard with pictures of athletes must be to those collectors. Take coins: I think they are mostly dull as hell (the same design and image but a different year? Ooohhh, my nipples explode with delight), but I get that some people are as intrigued with pennies as I am with lithographed cardboard. Whatever squeezes your lemon. But some stuff has fallen from collectible to junk. Philately (stamp collecting) has been in free-fall for years. I see crates of stamps all over the place at crazy low prices and I will sometimes buy a $1 box of stamps but when I research what I find I realize that I wasted a buck. Even the interesting ones just don’t sell. Same with publications. Just last weekend I had a conversation with a longtime dealer about the lack of demand for pubs. Unless you have very specific issues of Sports Illustrated, for example, they will sit and rot in your garage and eBay store. I have finally resorted to giving away boxes of unsellable sports publications and just writing off my crappy investments in them. I have a short list of which ones to buy, and forget the rest.

I also watch card auctions, and the results have been interesting of late. I think we are entering a period of barbell-shaped demand for vintage cards and memorabilia. High end stuff (whether that is rare, high grade, or just very high demand) has a highly competitive audience in the 10% of Americans who now account for 50% of consumer spending. Desirable vintage cards are so in demand from the Top Ten that prices are huge. It is a wet dream for anyone who was smart (lucky) enough to have gotten in when the prices were reasonable and you didn’t have to sell plasma to afford to grade in bulk (thanks again for that price hike, PSA, you fuckers). On the other end, people who cannot afford to spend much and want to collect are steady consumers of both low-grade vintage and modern versions of vintage cards. A stack of beater 1952 Topps commons and 1952 Topps Mantle tribute cards from the shiny era will sell to those collectors. I am amazed at how that stuff moves. Like society as a whole, there appears to be a middle-class squeeze forming. Top prices for middling stuff are things of the past.

Finally, I wanted to comment on modern. I was driving to work one recent morning and passed the new flagship store for Burbank Sports Cards. The line out the door and around the block. Turns out it was a big Pokemon release day. There also was a report in Sports Collectors Daily about the September grading figures. Per SCDaily:

--At SGC, only 28% of the cards it graded were printed prior to 1970.

--At CGC, a full 88% of its grades went to 21st century cards.

--At PSA 66% of the cards graded in September were made in the last five years.

These are classic signs of a bubble forming. People are chasing and breaking tons of new products and flooding the slabbers with the results as fast as they can to try and cash in. Every flea market I attend is overrun with modern discards. The overall economic news isn’t fabulous, so I expect the pop to come sooner rather than later.

Now, some of you are thinking (correctly) that I shit on modern a lot. Guilty with explanation. It isn’t that I don’t understand modern, as some critics suggest, it is that I understand it all too well. It is a casino overlaying a game of hot potato. Bust that box, harvest the hits, and flip it while it is hot before you get stuck holding the bag. Or send in the hit and hope that PSA blesses you with spontaneous wealth. The long-term value on it is nil except for generational talents on special cards. All those folks standing in line at Burbank Sports Cards for hours that morning weren’t there because they were excited to put the new cards into their collections, they were there because they were eager to gamble on finding a lottery ticket of an insert and to get on with flipping the rest to make rent. Mind you, I am not claiming to be one of those annoying True Collectors who refuse to acknowledge that we are all flippers and investors in some respect; I’m a loud, out and proud investor, and I can’t stand those sanctimonious True Collector pricks, either. Sure, you may not care about money but your heirs will. Or your kids will when you are salted away in an expensive facility obliviously drooling into your oatmeal. So why not just go with it and admit that the finances play a role? Trust me, you’ll feel better not being as intellectually dishonest.

I can only speak to my experience. Once I got real with myself and learned to hold two ideas in my mind at once (that cards are fun and that cards are investments), I found it very freeing. It is so much easier to consciously aim for both profit and fun than to pretend the money side is irrelevant or nonexistent. The bonus of reorienting my thinking is that my hesitation at going hard after a really special piece went away because I emotionally understood that I could and would be able to sell it down the line after I finish enjoying it. Cards aren’t fleeting, like a good meal, they are permanent, like old man farts in a recliner. My friends who don’t collect consume their fun; I invest in it. It also opens your mind to fresh angles, a pivot to different cards or card-adjacent stuff when mainstream cards go into a bubblicious phase as I think is brewing in modern. I love old cardboard. It is a happy place for me. I also love turning a profit on old cardboard. That it is a happy place for me, too. Collectors get the endorphin hits of acquisition and ownership. I get three endorphin hits for my money: when I buy, when I own, when I cash out.

So, what is the play going forward? On the buying end, enhanced selectivity and price discipline. I plan to buy much more selectively unless I get rock bottom prices or find fantastic stuff that is perfect for my collection. If someone will sell me an accumulation of 19th century trade cards at a few cents each, or an entire bankers’ box of ephemera for ten bucks, I will do the deal regardless of market. On the selling side, I plan to sell into the surges in various categories. Prewar nonsports cards of American historical figures are hot? Goodbye, President Washington. Thanks for the Benjamins. I’ll see you again when interest dies down. Finally, I am going to make judicious use of the recycling bin to get rid of the chaff. Yes, you read that right. I am actually throwing away stuff proactively so I can devote my time to bigger and better things instead of trying to move dreck. As I write this I am fresh from tossing five boxes of unsellable crap into the bin, and it feels great. Weird, but great. Enjoy the ice skating in Hell; it just froze over.