Made it to a Card Show...with Dime Boxes!

Last month I was able to attend a card show for the first time in a long time, probably well over a year.  It was honestly a sparsely-attended, somewhat-depressing affair.  There were maybe 20 total tables, the majority of which were older dealers looking to sell cards that weren't really anything special for easily two to three times what you'd pay online.  There was also your standard unopened wax guy, and one or two memorabilia or comic book dealers.  I nearly left without purchasing a single thing but thankfully one seller, set up right by the exit, made my trip to the show worthwhile...

...because he had dime boxes!  Quite a few of them as well.  Enough that it took me a couple of hours to dig through them all at a relatively quick pace.  I picked up about 90 cards in total, 60 or so for my collection and another 30 going out in trades.

I pulled just about every Red Sox card that I wasn't certain I already had.  These first two are the first 2005 Leaf cards in my collection, period.  One nice thing about these boxes is that they contained a good amount of stuff from the time period when I wasn't collecting (1997 - 2006).

Like I said, I was pulling just about any Red Sox card I came across.  This unlicensed monstrosity is one only a team collector could love.

There were a handful of Vlad cards to be had.  I've sent the majority off to Douglas of Sportscards from the Dollar Store just today, but hung onto this Topps flagship card from Guerrero's days with Montreal.

Just had to grab this one for a dime because it screams '90s.  Look at those colors and that terrible Devil Rays uniform.  This card is made of an acetate type material and is transparent, which was part of what got me to drop a dime on it.

One of those cases of "it's so bad it's good" I guess...

What I liked about this one was the perspective the photograph gives you about what it must have been like to stand in the batter's box against Randy Johnson.  Yikes!

Speaking of yikes, the back of the card is equally fantastic as it features a wonderful close-up of one of the most famous mullets in all of sports.

More Red Sox...

I don't even like how this card looks really, but it commemorates such an historical event in Boston sports history that I decided to grab a copy.

Yes, it's a lowly common but I liked this classic pose of one of the best hitters of his generation.

I even purchased a football card, which is a rarity for me.  I'm not going to start collecting the sport any time soon, but I do watch the Pats every Sunday and this Ben Coates was a nice blast from the past.

I've seen these Topps Gallery cards posted on other blogs before, and for the most part the artwork is well done.  I was surprised by how thick and high quality the card stock is.

One of my favorite finds on the day had to have been this David Eckstein rookie.  Eckstein has been a hole in my Red Sox collection for a long time, happy to have plugged it for just ten cents.

The dealer had a decent amount of Nomar Garciaparra cards, most of which I snagged.  Though they don't scan all that impressively, I'm a big fan of the Metal Universe releases and was happy to see this one in the dime box.

Sticking with shiny Garciaparras, here are a couple from the 1999 Bowman's Best set...

Again, Metal Universe is great.  Nomo was the man in the collecting world for a good stretch of the mid-'90s so it's always fun adding some of his cards on the cheap.

Case in point!

Even a basketball card managed to find its way home with me.  The first Topps Finest releases were epic, regardless of the sport.  On top of that I used to drain many threes as Hardaway while playing the NBA Live video games back in the day.  I would have grabbed more cards from this set at a dime each, but Tim here was the only one I encountered.

Rounding out the dime box purchases, here's another from the 2003 Topps Gallery HOF set.  The painting on this one is less successful than the Jim Palmer above.  It's hard to tell in the scan, but this one has a shiny, foil coating, which I learned makes it an Artist's Proof parallel.

That was a decent sampling of what was available in the dime boxes, but there were quarter boxes as well.  Out of those, I managed to pluck some well-loved '59 Topps cards for my beater set.  Right now I'll take any card I don't have, regardless of condition, as long as the front is intact enough to at least tell who the player is.  At a quarter per, I was grabbing any I came across.

Based on the front of the card, the nickname of the "Professor" seems fitting for Jim.

The guy who maybe tipped Kirk Gibson off on what Eckersley was gonna toss before that epic 1988 World Series blast?

It almost looks as though Sal Maglie is in better shape than the others, until you notice the vertical crease that runs the entire length of the card.  Doesn't bother me for a quarter.

You didn't think I was going to go this entire post without a hockey card, did you?  There wasn't a ton of hockey to choose from, but I decided this Joe Sakic was unique enough to pluck from the 50 cents bin.  I'm not a huge Black Diamond guy, but I know the quad-diamond cards like this one are the most short-printed, and I liked that Joe's featured in an NHL All-Star jersey as well.

This is technically a football card, as it hails from the 2009 Philadelphia release.  I'm an amateur history fan, and I really liked the artwork on this card.  These particular fighter planes were used in one of the most significant conflicts in world history, World War II.  This one's from the 50 cents bin as well.

Last but not least, a card I paid $2 for, a very shiny Nomar Garciaparra from 1998 Score.  This is the Platinum Team parallel.  I had never seen this particular parallel before, but it was just so shiny and over-the-top that I couldn't resist plunking down two bills for it.

So there you have it, a pretty nice selection of cards, especially given what my options were at the show.  Everything in this entire post came to a grand total of $6.70, which is more than reasonable in my opinion.

This wasn't my entire haul, I've got plenty more to share when I can get around to scanning it all in...