Will anyone be giving a blow-by-blow account from the National this year?

[Steve_NY]

I have done 34 nationals and have seen the good and the bad, well not very bad except for both earlier nationals in A.C. So I kind of expected this A. C. to be similar. In fact this was probably my best national in 10 to 15 years.

If you pick up many new acquisitions, and don't bring the same display every year, you are bound to do well if you are different than everyone else. If you load your display with 1950s and 1960s cards, you will not do well unless you already have a defined client base that buys from you every year.

For example, a potential customer saw that I had the best graded Cuban, Japanese and Caribbean cards. He asked if I had any Valenzuelan cards, and I responded that I had a 1962 Spahn in grade 7, 8, 9 or 10. He said that was impossible and wanted to see the card. It was in grade 7, and is the highest grade being a 1 of 2. He wanted to do some research on it, and left to contact me this week. I am not counting the days, because I let my stock sell itself; if he decides against it, such is life.

My point is that if you don't visit every table, you will never know what you are missing. Five of the cards that have already been posted as pickups were from me. I am not one of the big guys who pick up large finds, but I tend to focus on special items that are in demand or no one has ever seen it, including me.

Stop by next year as I am the 8th booth straight in the door.

But I will report that I have spoken to many other dealers who responded that they were down in sales from 20% to 50% or more. Maybe I was just lucky but before the show opened to the public, I was already up almost 200% from last year, so this was a great show for me.

Steve Sabow
Dynamictwo@aol.com

[Exhibitman]

I have been to every National since 2003. This was the worst. Logistically, it was a nightmare for anyone traveling from the West. AC is not near anything, really, and has a small airport that is served only by Spirit, which is the worst airline around. I had to split my trip into two pieces to get in and out of there and maintain my sanity in the process. It was an ordeal. It is actually easier to get to London from L.A.

As a consequence of the travel logistics and the higher cost of hotels for the show, a good many vintage dealers did not make the journey or did so but only with what they could carry on a plane. That was problematic for me. I tend to collect oddball items, regional cards, team issues, etc., so when the bulk is missing from the booths, so is my target material. I need to pick lots of random stuff to find the items I collect; little of that at the show. There was quite a bit of nice mainstream slabbery, but that really isn't my speed at a show. I can get that stuff on eBay or in any of the dozens of AH's.

I basically finished my real shopping by Thursday and spent the rest of my time filling in items in my postwar mainstream collection. Nice cards and cheap, but hardly worth a trip to AC. I really only got three decent prewar items, another Thorpe strip card in the Indian headdress and a pair of Diamond Dust cards (Grove and Vandermeer), both on Wednesday morning during set-up.

One more rant: there is no friggin' way that the National needs that much floor space. That is just nonsense. The sheer amount of dead space and useless area on that show floor was proof. The corporate carpet was vast and empty, and the pack break pavilion was also big and basically deserted.

On the plus side, I did get to meet and chat with Riddick Bowe, 2x heavyweight champ and HOFer, and get him to sign a ticket from one of his Holyfield fights:



And I got this graded:



And this too:



Plus, I was able to drop off my order with SGC for their August special and give them the Thorpe and the Diamond Dust cards in that order, a cost and effort saver.