mild panic attack
 

Had the family over today and was sharing some of my collection with my father. As I pulled out my favorite set (1953 Bowman) I had a mild panic attack.

I keep my cards in Ultra Pro pages and D ring binders and this is the first time that I've ever seen anything like this. The cards are unharmed and it's only on the first page. Any ideas? Some sort of moisture? It wipes right off.

Please forgive the brutal iPhone picture.

Rob, so is it actually water in some form, or some other type of liquid? Maybe some condensation from the album being exposed to humid conditions?

You said it wipes off. If it's on the surface, it's probably caused by the binder.

The term humid just turned on a light bulb for me. My one month old son is sleeping next to us in a bassinet. We use a humidifier to keep some moisture in the air for him. It's on low, but I bet that's what's doing it. Think I'll move the cards to another room until we're done with the humidifier.

Glad you found it now! This is a lesson for us all, look at and share your collection often! ;)

That Sam Jethroe on the first page was always one of my favorite non-superstar cards.

When your son is older, he will enjoy the story of how his atmospheric requirement nearly damaged the card collection.:D

Quick update on this that I meant to post awhile back. I looked at all my sets in binders and this only happened to cards that were in 8 card sleeves. All the 9 card sleeves were fine. So my sets from 53-56 looked like this, but none of my sets from 57-79. I wonder why that is. All my cards are in Ultra Pro pages. Another thing I did for a safety precaution is to place a blank page as the first page since those were the only ones that seemed affected.

I thought I had this figured out, but the fact that this shows up on the 8s and not the 9s has me a little confused.