The Joy and Heartache of Collecting Vintage

As I slowly whittle away at my overly ambitious 2012 collecting goals I decided to post some of my thought on my vintage collecting since that's what I've been concentrating on this past year. I love vintage cards. I don't know why, but there's just something about them that evoke the glory days of baseball when titans like Aaron, Mantle, Mays, Robinson (Frank that is), Banks, and Williams (of the Red Sox variety) graced us with their presence on the diamond. When these stars appear on the cardboard, along with a background of ballparks that are long gone and belong to the ages, it's like you're staring at a window looking back through the sands of time at a game that truly was the national pastime. Trying to collect Reds cards from the 1950s and 1960s has proven rewarding, but difficult at the same time. While I love adding these pieces of history to my binder, it's a grueling process since I only have a monthly budges of around fifty dollars and since I'm a stickler for condition, I want my cards to be free of creases, marks, and paper loss... something that's not easy when it comes to paper that's more than a half century old. Anyway, while it's painfully slow and time consuming to collect vintage cards, there's nothing more rewarding in the hobby than to look down at your binder and see a completed page staring up at you.