I’m glad to finish documenting my favorite blog reads (for myself but sharing since it may interest others). Have a Happy New Year 2019!

8. Joe’s nightmare of Heritage 2024 is also mine (from different angles including the fear of about 6 more Yount and Brett rookie reprints before 2024).

7. Shoebox Legends’ Frankenset series where he considers which cards to add is some good casual reading. This one had a 1975 card that stayed in – so that’s a win.

6. Bob’s post about nothing is very apropos as I’ve recently been watching a lot of Seinfeld reruns.  I relate to the Allen card on the desk making you happy.

5. I’m a sucker for good vintage stories with a card/photography angle. Bo had a good one here with Rico Petrocelli, who’s in the 1975 set.

4. Duff retired – congratulations and thank you for your service! Everything about this post was cool. I wonder if he ever figured out what he was going to do with that Nascar tire he won in a prize drawing at a hockey game. If not, maybe now he’ll have time to work on that 🙂

3. 2018 was a year where at least a couple of bloggers reassessed there collecting approach. I expect it’s something many of us think of occasionally. Night Owl wrote here and Tony took stock earlier in the year.

I also felt naive when I started collecting 1975 cards again. Defining your path is full of twist and turns. Placing limits is hard at first, but for me it permeated my habits to a point where I know I can’t have it all. You grow wiser. And now I can usually jedi-mind trick myself out of buying yet another Yount or Brett rookie reprint (but I do like that poster in Tony’s post 🙂  It also feels like many of us got parallel overload in 2018. How does this play out? We’ll see.

2. Night Owl’s seventh favorite non-sports card put this on the list. That was the card I just posted for Christmas – a 1975 style Kris Kringle. Reading his post turned into one of those “I didn’t know this existed moments” wherein I immediately started surfing the web and bought the card that day. He’s also got a Beanball reprint card in there – also up my alley.

1. I liked Bo’s now & then post about a Flashback card and Paul’s look back at card companies from the junk wax era. These are in the same category as the typical fare in the Topps Archives blog, which easily in my Top 5.

Toppcat writes about Topps history like in this post or tough to find hobby artifacts. My favorite post of the year snuck into the list just a few days ago. It’s about the 1975 Topps Sports club. I happened to start collecting mail-in collectibles recently and ended up with an extra of the Topps baseball and football Sport Club newsletters (so if anyone’s interested drop me a line).

These are about as direct a connection to my childhood as 1975 cards. To a kid, mailing in for stuff in the 70’s was like seeking supplies from some remote island in the 1880’s. Could you just picture your kid self on that island? I’m picturing a Seinfeld-esque bit… What should we order next, sir, flour… coffee? No! Cancel all the flour. Cancel all the sundries! We need more uncut checklists. More Sea-Monkeys… and Sports Club newsletters!