NYT: 20 Million Cards: A Sports Memorabilia Gold Mine Uncovered in Virginia

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by Hankphenom

Is this the equivalent of hoarding, which in its extremer forms seems pretty clearly to be a mental illness related to some kind of childhood deprivation? We have all seen examples of where collecting as a hobby can take on more of an obsessive/compulsive nature if we're not careful or have that mindset. Trying not to be judgemental here, but what would possess someone to just keep filling shelf after shelf with duplicates, or unopened boxes of stuff that he knows will never have much value, etc. I don't get it. Does it say in the article what his motivation was in accumulating and making storage for such an enormous stash of cards? Was it money, did he hope to cash this stuff in one of these days, or he just liked buying more and more, or what?

Hoarding could be the problem or just someone hoping to cash in or a combo of both. All I know is I would absolutely love to be able to spend the insane time it would take to go through and look at all those cards one by one.

I had a card hoarding problem for a while. From the time I got into cards in the 80s I loved buying, selling and trading cards. I would buy huge collections and sell the best stuff to get all my money back and then keep the rest. After around 15 years I had build up an entire room full of cards. I had easily 5+ million cards and most had little to no value. That is when I decided I no longer enjoyed the selling part. I moved 4 times since then and moved them from house to house. Finally around 6-7 years ago I said this is crazy and went through most of it and now have a very small percentage of that left. It was really fun going through the cards and getting rid of all the worthless junk. Funny and bad part is all the stuff that was considered junk that I burned/gave away was easy to sell during the covid era.

[butchie_t]

Wow, How many of those cards have cardboard worth more than the image printed on them?????

[butchie_t]

You still did the right thing. I had a lot of junk cards too. It was very cathartic to weed through them all, keeping the marginally more valuable cards and ditching the rest. Not to mention the fact that it freed up space and weight when we moved a couple of years ago.

Now I am much more streamlined and un-encumbered by all the crap cards.

Originally Posted by bnorth

Hoarding could be the problem or just someone hoping to cash in or a combo of both. All I know is I would absolutely love to be able to spend the insane time it would take to go through and look at all those cards one by one.

I had a card hoarding problem for a while. From the time I got into cards in the 80s I loved buying, selling and trading cards. I would buy huge collections and sell the best stuff to get all my money back and then keep the rest. After around 15 years I had build up an entire room full of cards. I had easily 5+ million cards and most had little to no value. That is when I decided I no longer enjoyed the selling part. I moved 4 times since then and moved them from house to house. Finally around 6-7 years ago I said this is crazy and went through most of it and now have a very small percentage of that left. It was really fun going through the cards and getting rid of all the worthless junk. Funny and bad part is all the stuff that was considered junk that I burned/gave away was easy to sell during the covid era.

[Yoda]

A deep psychological need for sports cards...........lots of sports cards. Credit to John Wick.