Collecting Focus: Share Your Story

[yanks87]

I have always collected what I like, from the early days of buying older cards because they were just "better" to my grown up years, trying to chase specific cards that I longed for as a kid, no matter what the condition was. I would chase the players I liked, and go off on weird tangents. When my kids grew up and left, I found that I started collecting sets, but not the big ones, again the some what fringe sets. Then I met LEAF.

I initially tried to put the set together to pass down to my kids, as it was from the years that my parents and my wife's parents were born. As I started to dig into the set, I was drawn to the bright colors, and somewhat simple techniques used to print them. I came to this board and got a schooling from, TedZ, Steve Birmingham and others, and then I went full crazy and wrote a book on them. As I did the research, I tried to establish the concept of a late printing, bouncing ideas off the board in order to fill in the corners of the map. The whole time I found myself picking up more and more of the cards, not just the baseball, but the boxing, football, and pirates. Don't get me started on the premiums!

Serendipitously, Nathaniel Grow made a post that would validate my theories and prove without a doubt that the baseball set was launched in 1949. As the book hit the amazon (re:LEAF is the book title), I continued to buy Leaf cards, completing the boxing set, almost finishing the pirate set and now turning eyes onto the football set.

As I have gone through buying and selling LEAF cards, I have found myself grabbing other cards that are rooted in the LEAF set, so it has really become the North Star of my collection, and the tangents coming off of it, all have connections back to the cards, the research and the lore around this set of cards.