Trade with Waxaholic

That reminds me, I need to send Waxaholic some football stickers, Premier League stickers. It is a top of my list of things to do. That and finding ways to watch Canadian Women's Soccer. Where does he find these images?

On a completely unrelated topic he sent me a bunch of Red Sox cards, including the Josh Beckett shown above. I have obtained a number of red swatches recently and it makes a change from the usual white swatches. He also sent some unopened packs of cards. A rack pack of 2008 Upper Deck and 1989 Topps BIG. Sweet. I will be cracking them open on Pursuit of Red Sox, to further my ongoing mission to locate Red Sox in packs.

Thank you Sir Waxaholic. 

Trade with Play at the Plate

A super trade with Brian at Play at the Plate. A while back he was eager to complete the Topps Diamond giveaway, which he eventually did way back in September. It was very easy on my part to e-mail the diamond codes. In exchange he sent a pile of the Kimball Champions cards, which for some explicable reason I decided to collect. My progress has been slow, but these are such lovely cards I'm not giving up just yet.

Thanks to Brian for bringing me a few steps closer. 

2011/2012 Topps Match Attax Football

The recent 6-1 drubbing of Manchester United by their close rivals Manchester City put a huge smile on the face of most football supporters (except the Manchester United faithful-naturally). It would have been nice if it had been Norwich, or West Bromwich Albion, or even Fulham handing out the humility lessons. However we are not fussy. It's not bitterness or jealousy that makes us feel this way. Manchester United is, and has been, a great team for many years. It is more the cocky, swaggery arrogance that the manager and some of the players have adopted in recent times. There lies within the joy of an unbiased supporter.

Unfortunately Topps has developed a somewhat similar attitude towards the Match Attax Brand. Build it and they will come. It's Match Attax, they will buy it no matter what. Let's not forget this is a product directed towards children, the Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh generation. But I cannot feel anything except disappointment as an adult and as a swap club organiser at school.

Let me talk about the positives, or more fitting 'the' positive is an insert called Golden Moments.

Yes they are golden cards, but the 40 card insert focuses on the last 20 years of Premier League football. The set looks at some of the iconic moments of Premier League football such as Jurgen Klinsmann's goal celebration from 1994, David Beckham's goal from the half-way line in 1996, Ole Gunnar Solksjaer netting four goals after coming on as a sub in 1999 and the remarkable Blackburn Premier League winners in 1995. This is a great idea for an insert, even in gold. Dissapointingly missing is Eric Cantona's flying kick on a spectator in 1995, Roy Keane's leg breaking tackle in 2001, Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer's same team fight in 2005 and any one of the many Patrick Viera moments- Roy Keane tunnel bust up perhaps. However, for me, the positives stop there.

My main beef is the 'Limited Edition' cards, of which there are 6. These limited cards are not inserted in packs randomly except for one, which is inserted randomly into packs only available from one particular chain of bookshops. The other five limited cards can only be 'collected' through purchasing a football magazine (£2.99), the Match Attax collectors tin (£9.99), the Match Attax collectors box (£7.50), the Match Attax multi-pack (£5.00) and the Match Attax starter pack (£4.99). So a very clever marketing ploy to make you purchase more Match Attax in unique disguises, at a rough cost of £30.00, which would give you the five limited cards and roughly 150 Match Attax cards. There are 360 base cards to collect and a further 65 Man of the Match,100 club and a referee. Is the picture becoming clearer. Some collectors may feel that this is fair and that you purchase all these different products and obtain the limited card, rather than trawling through packs. Fair enough.

My other complaint is that it still much the same as the last years set, and the years before, and the year before that, with just the colour of the backs changed. Topps has the ability to produce design changes elsewhere. Why not here? The starter pack book to keep your cards in is crap as well.

All that said, I will however be collecting the entire set again as part of the swap club I run at school. The lucky winner of our club competition gets to own the completed set and as many of the 'inserts' I can collect.

I think though that this will be my last time doing it. My fifth and final completed set.

An uncomfortable silence

So sorry for the uncomfortable silence of the last month or so. Real life, once again, took over. Many things took place during this forced interval- a few trade packages arrived, a number of blog posts floated into the ether, my computer reset itself to the factory settings,  the Red Sox collapsed, (which is well documented and probably doesn't need to be mentioned again), Match Attax 2011/2012 was released (pretty much the same as what has gone before), this years Doctor Who season finished with a flourish (some excellent episodes but the ending was a disappointment), Australia were knocked out of the Rugby World Cup by New Zealand (England didn't fare much better) and my head sold her house in Florida, so I can no longer expect surprise baseball cards (nor Icelandic, volcanic, delayed treasures).
But now a short holiday and a chance to catch -up.

Confessions of a Collector Part 2

This is the continuation of Part 1
I recently completed this fascinating book by Hunter Davies, a well known journalist/novelist in the UK. He talks about being an accumulating collector. He hypothesises that there are two distinct species of collector, accumulators and serious collectors. 

The serious collector goes out of their way to collect, and actively searches for items. You don't have to spend much money, or acquire masses, but you do have to be serious enough to go forth and collect. Then there is the accumulator, a much more passive animal. A collector who doesn't really throw anything away and amasses 'stuff'.

He suggests that he started as an accumulator and then moved onto serious collecting. As he became older he had more time on his hands, more money, his children had grown older and then there was the dawning realisation that he had accumulated some interesting items along the way.  Although he says he has about 100 collections on the go, for the sake of writing this book he condenses them into 16 specific categories, although he adds that there is overlapping of his collections.

I tried to think back to all the collections that I have started, because like Hunter I never went out and actively collected. For instance- my primary collecting area for many years has been baseball. If baseball items became available for sale on e-bayUK I would bid. In the earlier days of e-bayUK, I'm talking 2000ish, I won many of the baseball cards items listed, usually unchallenged. At this time there didn't appear to be any active baseball collectors in the UK. Primarily it was cards that people had bought back from holidays, or been given by someone who had been on holidays. Occasionally vintage cards came up for sale. I'm talking about pre-1980, hoping not to offend with the vintage tag. These attracted some attention but considering what they were, it was minimal. Gradually more collectors appeared and more baseball cards, I then became more discerning and only went for the interesting and unusual or cards that I had never seen before. I accumulated 1000's of cards. Thankfully I was able to trade most of them away and become a serious collector of Jacoby Ellsbury, Red Sox and vintage. I'm still not that serious, don't get me wrong I enjoy baseball cards, but if I was a serious collector I would own the black parallel 2005 Bowman rookie. But I don't.

So thinking back to other collections I have had such as stamps. My dad worked for a company that dealt with Japanese companies, so I had many Japanese stamps and coins. I also accumulated matchbox cars, I didn't think to keep the boxes because I wanted to play with the cars not the boxes. For a while I collected train tickets. I had masses of train tickets. There was in the 1970's a radio station called 2SM which produced, on a piece of paper, a top 40 singles list. It came out every week and we had a record shop very close so I was able to get those and some posters advertising records. Later I accumulated a large stack of 'singles' records. 

I have already mentioned the aluminium milk bottle tops. For a while I collected money boxes. The local banks produced different money boxes sans money. My biggest collection was football cards - rugby league and Aussie Rules. When I was collecting, Scanlens was the biggest producer of cards in Australia. The designs I realise now are similar to the baseball and football cards in the USA. I collected, traded, ticket off my checklists every year. I even save the labels from Ardmona peaches to send for complete sets of cards.
Even back then I collected stickers; my bedroom door was adorned with overlapping stickers. Two I remember specifically- A large Fußball macht spaß German sticker which roughly translated is Football is fun and a bright orange sticker that said I'm mad about muffins. Where these came from is anybody's guess.
Another ongoing accumulation was Ephemera, all manner of magazines, Asterix and Tin Tin books, clippings from newspapers, postcards, computer punch cards (again from my father's work), cards from Weetbix and Sanitarium cereal boxes. Boy did I collect some crap. But reading Confessions of a Collector, it appears that I wasn't alone.
Think back...what were the most obscure items you collected?

Confessions of a Collector Part 1

I have just finished reading this book by a pretty well known newspaper columnist in the UK, Hunter Davies. Not a hack rag tabloid phone hacker either, he is a proper journalist. If you're a Beatles fan you may recognise Hunter as the only person to write an authorised biography of the Beatles. He describes himself as a compulsive collector and goes into great details about his numerous collections. He also talks about why he chose particular areas of collecting.

Hunter started with stamps. I am sure there are many of us, of a certain age, who collected stamps. Unfortunately the glory days of stamps and stamp collecting are behind them. I still carefully remove stamps from envelopes and packages, mainly because it is so unusual to have stamps now. It is all pre-printed and computer generated labels, which is disappointing because stamps can be very interesting. 

Whenever we receive a parcel or letter from my parents in Australia, it always has stamps. I not sure if the Australian postal system doesn't have printed labels or whether my parents, being 80plus, use stamps out of habit.  They are a minority. Recently the Royal Mail issued Thunderbirds stamps and this bought the stamp collector within me back again.

Hunter talks about swapping stamps, laying awake scrutinising his stamps and learning a great deal about other countries from stamps like: kings and queens, plants and animals, holiday celebrations, science and space, that sort of educational stuff. But he also talks about them being therapeutic. He was ill with asthma in his childhood and all the allergy testing and prescribed medicines didn't work. However he found that the distraction of immersing himself in his collection would offer relief. He also collected cuttings from newspaper about his favourite football team, postcards from interesting places, marbles and comics. Then he went off the university and forgot about his various collections. This all sounds very familiar.

In my pre-secondary school childhood I collected football cards (I even kept the wrappers), football programmes and a weekly magazine called Big League. For a short time I collected milk bottle tops, the aluminium foil type that came in many different colours.To this day I'm not sure why. Maybe I was just attracted to shiny things. Then other interests took over: playing sports, school work and I became interested in statistics and gathered information from the newsapaper about cricket and football, keeping my own league tables, man of the match awards and other useless pieces of information.

Hunter then goes onto describing becoming a 'born again' collector. It all came flooding back to him- the joys and delights of collecting. It was a gradual thing, over many years, he just took a  while to realize it.

I know exactly when I became a collector again and it wasn't over many years. It was in October 1980- a warm spring evening. No not really. I don't remember in that much detail. But it was October 1980 when I was given a stack of 1980 Topps baseball cards, 84 to be exact. The rest, I had to wait a little longer to collect.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen-trade me your cards

The pursuit of 2009 Goodwin Champions wants list
  The pursuit of 2010 Topps Allen and Ginter wants list.

 The pursuit of 2011 Kimball Champion inserts wants list