My biggest mistakes were not buying rare things when I found them.
In the days before the internet, I used to go out looking for things all the time. I went to auctions, antique stores, flea markets, antique shows and placed advertisements in newspapers. I did this while in college and thus had only a small amount of money to spend at any one time.
Unfortunately for me, there were times that I found some great stuff but didn't have the money to buy it.
Examples:
1000 N cards (only three baseball players, N28's of Clarkson, Keefe and Caruthers) for $3,500 dollars.
Four times finding stacks of at least 30 B 18's blankets (no Joe Jackson but with Cobb and Johnson) for $8 to $10 dollars a piece if I took them all.
A stack of about 50 cards from the early 1920's including 20 Curtis Ireland Candy cards (including a Ty Cobb) for $1,000 dollars.
A nice Kalamazoo Bats card of a Philadelphia player that had the ad on the back for $600 dollars.
I also remember calling about ads for auctions in the Antique Weekly paper concerning Pinkerton cards. These were not the cabinet cards but the ones with score cards on the back. There were big name players but I never bid on these because back then, they were not considered "real" cards. Only the cabinet cards were considered authentic.
David
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