A nice find at an antique mall

[BradH]

Finding sports cards at antique malls generally amounts to just junk-era stuff that is almost always WAY overpriced. On Friday I had one of my better finds in a while: rubber-banded stacks of 1970s cards for $3-6 per stack. Each stack was a little different in size and appeared to range between 25 to 150 cards each. There were also plus some 400-count boxes of 1972-74 cards (that I assumed were all commons) for $10 per box.

Each of the bundled stacks had a "star card" on top and I figured they did this to bait people into buying the stack, while filling the rest of the bundle with commons.

I'm building some early '70s sets and while I figured that a lot of these cards would have soft corners and/or creases, I thought it'd be fun to just sort through them.

I decided to buy almost everything they had. I passed on the 400-count boxes of '73s and '74s and I passed on the small rubber-banded stacks of '71s (they looked pretty beat up). I grabbed the 400-ct box of '72s because I'm far from finishing that set and I thought this bulk lot would get me a lot closer to completion.

I have only sorted through a stack of the ‘77s and '72s so far and some are really nice, some have a ding or two on the corners and a few are in rough shape. But for the most part they’re fine for the sets I'm building.

I have been very pleasantly surprised that the stacks I've sorted so far are NOT just a bunch of beat up commons. There are star cards throughout.

Looking forward to finish sorting them this weekend and I'll post some pics as I go along. (Unfortunately, the top card on one of the stacks of '77s is a Nolan Ryan cloth sticker that appears to have suffered damage due to the rubber bands.)