Shoebox Legends World Headquarters - The Card Chest

In an effort to get myself motivated with the blog here in year nine, I'm going to be featuring some "behind the scenes" posts this year.  A look at what happens here at Casa de Shoebox Legends beyond the keyboard to help produce the stunning, award-winning blog material that maybe 100 people will read (and that's a good post lately!).

For the first of these posts, we're looking at this relatively empty corner of my office/hobby room.  This photograph was taken probably a year ago, or maybe even longer now.  Sadly, my pal Eli there in the foreground is no longer around to protect the place with bark and bite.  What I want to focus on today though is that little end table.

The table served as the end table next to the bed in my very first apartment, when we eventually upgraded I claimed it for my hobby room.  It's nothing special, in fact I'm pretty sure it came from Target, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that two row monster boxes fit so nicely on the lower shelf!  Those three boxes hold the majority of my autograph collection, plus some other really significant cards.

What always bothered me was the top of the table, it was a little too low for a guy my height since it's meant to be a bedside table, and not very ornate or interesting looking.  Well, browsing around an antiques store with my wife one weekend I found the perfect solution...

A card chest!  Pretty cool, huh?  All four drawers pull out and are completely removable.  This thing is solidly constructed and much more interesting to look at than the plain tabletop.  Obviously it was not created with the intention of storing sports cards though.  Any guesses?

As you can see from this photo of a removed drawer, this was actually used to store sewing needles back in the day.  I think it's awesome that the label is still (mostly) intact, I'm definitely leaving it just the way it is.  You can click the image for a larger view, but according to the label this stored Wilcox & Gibbs sewing needles.

I don't count "sewing enthusiast" among my many hobbies, but in researching it Wilcox & Gibbs seemed to be the big names in the business (along with Singer) in the very early days after the sewing machine was invented.  The Wilcox & Gibbs company produced machines from the late 1850s all the way through the 1940s.  I don't know how old this particular chest/cabinet is, but it's certainly safe to say it's a lot older than I am.

Here's a drawer loaded up with cardboard.  As you can see, there's plenty of height when the cards are placed in vertically, but the width isn't perfect.  Slanting the cards just a bit does the trick.  I only put sleeved cards in here, and I keep one of those "pack searcher decoy" thick cardboard slabs at the front and back of each row.  When the drawers get a little empty, I drop a hockey puck right in the back.  It fits perfectly, has a good amount of weight to it, and easily slides up or down to hold whatever cards are in the drawer in place snugly.  Seems to work great, haven't had a single damaged card yet.

Here's a look at the drawer full of cards from above.  I sound like an old crank saying this, but this chest is from an era where they just plain made better quality stuff.  There's not a piece of metal or a screw anywhere on this thing, just good old fashioned workmanship and jointed wood.  No particle board either!

In the top two drawers, I keep cards from COMC.  In the bottom two, cards from the quarter box at the local hobby shop.  Anytime I get back from the shop, or the few times a year when a COMC package arrives, I shuffle up the contents and drop them all randomly into their appropriate drawers.

Whenever I'm pressed for time, or looking for something a little more unpredictable and exciting, I pull open a drawer and select a couple of cards at random.  They may have been placed in there just weeks before, or maybe many months, and it won't be long before I can say years.  Usually I've forgotten I even had the cards I end up pulling, so it's almost got that "grab bag" element, except that I know they'll all be cards I hand selected and obviously like.  My "Quarter Box Quartet" posts all come about in this manner, and for times when I've got just a couple of minutes for the blog the COMC drawers make for great One Card Posts.

Here's the corner now.  It's unbelievable how well the chest fits, it's practically the exact length and width of the table I had, and the color's not too far off either.  I couldn't be happier with how this turned out.  It's not saying much but this is far and away the best $75 I ever spent on a piece of furniture.

As a working example of the card chest in action, I went ahead and grabbed a single card from the left COMC drawer for the conclusion of this post.  It ended up being a damn good one too:

This is one I definitely did not forget purchasing.  It's one of the only times I ever spent more than $10 on a single card on COMC (though just barely).

Anyway, that's a wrap.  That old sewing chest, combined with a little bit of patience, should provide me with a lot of entertainment for years to come.  There are hundreds if not thousands of cards stocked up in there at this point, I could stop filling it today (more on that soon) and still have enough content to blog for years.

How about you?  Are you storing any of your cards in something that was never designed for that purpose?  If so, I'd love to hear about it in the comments...