A serious question about baseball card porn
 

Well now that I have your attention….

My wife has been great regarding my spending $100's, if not $1000's (occasionally $10000's) on little pieces of old cardboard. It was a long learning curve for both of us, but her acceptance of the hobby solidified when she realized that for every major purchase I made for myself, I made sure she received an (at least) equally "valuable" piece of jewelry (we all do what we have to do…….).

However, the biggest issue from her perspective right now is the amount of (as she puts it) baseball porn that I have neatly placed in virtually every room and bathroom of our house (and we have a lot of rooms!). With the increase in the number of auction houses and the seemingly unending one-upmanship that seems to occur between the auction houses, I now have huge numbers of multi-volume, boxed sets of holographic covered, glossy catalogs all over the place. I am a reasonably neat person, but I too don't have a good solution to this issue. There are some catalogs that I immediately discard (due to complete disinterest in the contents), but the vast majority are filed chronologically by auction house on shelves, piled neatly in floor corners and present in innumerable magazine racks throughout our house.

I would fully admit, that the vast majority of these catalogs never get re-opened once the auction is finished, but every so often I do find myself perusing through an old catalog or two, marveling at the merchandise, remembering my bidding, kicking myself for not bidding more aggressively, etc., not to mention salivating over these little pieces of cardboard (hence my wife's comparison to porn!).

Anyway, I was wondering what strategies others have used to get over this catalog obsession. Like a bandage should I just pull it off and get rid of most/all of them? Should I just keep those that are not available online? Only keep the past 5 years? Should I get a larger house? Should I up my dosage of medication?

Any (thoughtful) advice would be appreciated.

I would say go through them quickly once. If you could put together one book case or book shelf of your favorite catalogues then keep that around. Recycle the rest.

I have a bunch of catalogs also. I'd recycle most of them and just keep the ones that you made a major purchase from or had consignments in. And maybe REA. Most of them are online anyway as you said.

Weed them out like you were preparing to move, which I did recently. Save the ones you would carry with you to another house, chuck the ones you would not.

I really added an obscene amount of weight to the dumpster parked in our driveway, on the way out the door. Surprised I didn't get charged an overweight fee, with all the paper bricks I threw into that thing.

Tell your wife that for every one pair of shoes she will discard you will throw away 25 catalogs...

I had stacks of catalogs too. Probably tens years of them, finally took them to a recycle center.

Joe

Card Porn
 

You could switch to the real thing...Scream Queens Trading cards

I say throw them away and spend more time looking at your actual collection. I get a catalog, flip through it a couple times, and in the bin it goes - most often before the auction is even over....especially since I have to get on their website to bid anyways.

Disclaimer: I am an anti-clutter freak. If something is not worth the space it takes up, it's a goner.

Currently, I flip through each magazine once when they arrive, then they go into the recycle on the porch. If I see something I like, I usually make a note of it in my iPhone and browse online later. I had a bunch of catalogs saved over a decade and just decided to recycle them all one day. Too much bulk in my spare bedroom that has become my baseball room (well, the room some of my baseball items sit in and I occasionally sit in....nothing too awesome going on here). The recycle truck had 2 full bins plus a large cardboard box of auction magazines (they were heavy!). I did save the few Barry Sloate and final few Mastro auction catalogs I had, and anything I received from Lew Lipset (auction catalogs, sales sheets, and progress notes he sent to his bidders - which I thought was neat, but is a completely electronic experience now).

Lee

Wow, glad to read this thread. I've tossed the catalogs into the recycle bin for years, but I always thought the purists on the forum here would look down on me for that. I felt I should have some sort of reference library, but since, as mentioned, everything is online, why take up the room??

I recycle all of them. There is no need in this day and age of internet based auctioneers to retain old catalogs. If there is something I want to have for research purposes I download it from the AH web site and store it that way.

"More Jewelry!"... Never Toss an REA LoG :D

We are collectors. We hoard by nature.

If we do not take time to identify precisely what to hoard, we will consume ourselves.

Throw away the magazines with the pictures of what you actually collect.

I remove the specific pages you think you might reference in the future, store them in a folder, and toss the rest. I have only kept one catalog in the time I have been receiving them, and when I get the next REA one this will go in the trash.