Back in the Day when cards had Borders.

 Collecting cards is what I have done a majority of my life. Many of us have collected the usual Topps or Bowman gum cards heck I can still remember the Fleer baseball cards of the 60's. I got serious at collecting Baseball cards as I would purchase the Topps complete sets. I can still remember the ads in the publications and how cheap these sets cost. I got some for $7.00 and as time went on, they increased but nothing like today's prices. I can still remember going to the local five and dime store and getting Topps baseball packs for 10 cents, yes 10 cents and I would buy the box of 36 packs for $3.60 and in opening these packs you got lots of the stars of the game. Nothing like today with getting less cards a pack or getting cards that are damaged. Today's cards when left in a box complete, they tend to stick together because of the gloss used on the paperboard and the cards today have one thing missing: BORDERS!! The Topps cards back in the day all had beautiful designs and a border which is very important. As you can see cards with borders help with finding a nicely centered card and it improves the overall condition of the card.

If you look closely at the example, you can see the Chelios card has a very small border on the left side, yet the Hull card has four borders that are 60/40 left to right and 70 /30 top to bottom. If we compare cards with no borders the difference is there are cards that have more of the photo in some cards and less in others which is caused by the way the cards are cut. Personally, I hate borderless cards. 

This card of Craig Smith shows less of the photo as you can see but in looking through 12 of these cards, I did find one card that shows more of the cards photo. Compare this card to the bottom card as it has less photo. If you look closely, you can see the difference as the letter "P" is missing some and the stripes on his jersey show less and the same with the skate. Now a lot of collectors don't see these differences mostly because the base cards are not as collectible as they were in the days of long past. 

When I was collecting back in the 1970's and 80's when you purchased cards the seller would just lick a stamp and that was the postage paid. It was so much more enjoyable to win cards through mail auctions as you had to place a bid and mail your bid along with the lot number and description of the card. You would be informed by mail and then you would send payment either by using a personal check or money order. I always used money orders because you would not have to wait while the check cleared. Back in the day if you were collecting older cards like I was collecting the tobacco cards, T-206, T-205 and even some nineteenth century cards but what was fun was the ads we would get never show what the cards looked like for the player you were buying it was a surprise when we would rip open the package to see the cards for the first time. I have lots of great memories from my early days of collecting. I hope everyone enjoyed this post as I am trying to change things up with different content. If you like what you see or read, then please post a comment and click the follow icon if you enjoy my blog. Happy collecting and Stay Safe!!!