The wet and humid weather all summer, and the continued
rainy weather this fall, have turned my basement into a den of dampness,
despite the fact I have two dehumidifiers constantly running down there. Just
about everything that’s stored in its dank depths is perpetually soggy and is
beginning to smell like old sweat-socks laced with mildew.
Unfortunately, when my husband and I moved into this house
nearly 10 years ago, we thought the basement would be the ideal place to store
all of the stuff we, at that time, were paying to keep in storage units...three
of them, to be exact, to the tune of about $350 per month. So moving everything
into our new basement saved us a bundle.
Little did we know that the basement the contractor had
guaranteed us was “as dry as the Sahara,” actually would turn out to be the Okefenokee in disguise.
So about a month ago, when I ventured down there, I decided
to look through the boxes and notebooks of trading cards my late husband had
collected over the years. I’m talking about more than 40 years...and over
900,000 cards.
The trading cards he always enjoyed collecting were the
non-sport variety, so there wasn’t a baseball or a basketball to be seen on any
of them. No, his collection featured everything from Star Wars and Superman
cards to the Beatles and the Beverly Hillbillies.
And, to my horror, I discovered that many of them now are
damp and beginning to warp and grow brown spots on them.
So I decided I’d better start selling them...and fast. I had futuristic visions of a giant pile of
paper pulp that once had been the cards, sitting like a mushy mountain in the
middle of the basement floor.
The first box of about 500 cards I opened came out all stuck
together in a big clump. My online research later informed me that collectors
call those clumps of cards “bricks” because they are solidly stuck together
like one. The Internet also offered ways in which to safely coax the cards
apart with only minimal damage, if any. One guy said to shove the cards into
the microwave. Another said to slam down the cards on a hard surface to loosen
them. And then there was a suggestion to pry them apart with a butter knife.
I decided to leave the “bricks” for another time and instead
concentrate on the cards stored in plastic pages in notebooks. Those were in
much better condition, although they smelled terrible.
I spent the next three days pulling cards out of the plastic
pages and allowing them to air out in the garage. Then I checked through
them to see if there were any complete sets. I found two sets right away –
Marvel Masterpieces and Marvel Universe, both of which featured characters from
Marvel Comics (The Incredible Hulk, Wolverine, Spider-Man, etc.), and both of
which contained over 100 cards each.
I listed them on Ebay and sold one set for $60 and the other
for $40. Suddenly I had a strong urge to spend a lot more time in the damp
basement – even if it meant my skin was in danger of sprouting mushrooms.
I noticed that the same guy, Ron, had bought both of the
sets. I figured he either was a big Marvel Comics fan...or a dealer. As it turned out, he was a dealer – and he
wasted no time contacting me about my cards.
“Do you have just the two sets you just sold or do you have
more?” he wrote to ask me.
“I have close to a million trading cards,” I answered. “Are
you interested in only the Marvel
ones?”
“No – I’m a dealer in Florida, so I’m interested in all
of them. If you want to sell the entire collection, let me know what you have
and I’ll make you an offer.”
I felt my pupils transform into the shape of dollar signs and
heard a faint “cha-ching!” sound in my ears. I mean, this guy had just paid
$100 for only two sets of my cards! I
barely dared to imagine what he’d be willing to pay for hundreds of thousands
of cards. Finally, I thought, smiling, I was going to be rich! Visions of a
first-class seat on a jet flight to Europe flashed through my mind.
“The only thing is,” Ron said, sticking a pin into my dream
bubble, “I want to know the condition of each card. I don’t want to buy any
creased, stained, torn or warped ones.”
I instantly thought of the “bricks” in the boxes in the
basement and wondered how I was going to pry them apart without damaging any
cards or losing precious money.
 |
| BRICK OF CARDS |
“There’s no way I can look through nearly a million
individual cards,” I said. “It would take me about 25 years.”
“Oh, I don’t expect you to sort through them all at once,”
he said. “Just put together a few good sets at a time – like 20 or 30 - and
I’ll buy them from you every month on a regular basis. That way, you can avoid
Ebay’s fees and commissions, and you’ll save a lot of money. We’ll have an
ongoing business arrangement, so to speak. It will be a win-win situation for
both of us.”
Sounded good to me – like having a regular job. So I immediately
set to work and tackled the notebooks. At least the cards in those weren’t in
bricks, and I was eager to make some fast money from Ron.
I spent the entire week sorting through so many cards, I
barely could move my fingers – or my neck, from looking down at all of the
cards’ tiny numbers for so many hours. The 1960s-1970s trading cards were easy
to make sets from because they consisted only of chronologically numbered
cards. But in the later years, specialty cards (stickers, holograms, foil-embossed,
autographs, etc.), which were randomly inserted in only a limited number of
packs, also were added to the sets. So the specialty cards were much more
valuable than the regular cards because they were difficult to find.
I managed, after about 30 hours of sorting, to put together
35 sets of cards, including most of the elusive specialty cards. One card I
found was personally autographed by one of the artists from Marvel Comics, so I
knew Ron, the dealer, would be drooling over that one.
I typed up a list of the cards and their condition and
emailed them to him, then I anxiously awaited his offer. He wrote back a few
hours later and said the sets on my list really weren’t worth very much, maybe
only $5 each, so he wouldn’t want to pay more than $3 per set, seeing he had to
make at least a small profit on them in his store.
He offered me $100 for the entire lot.
“And if you throw in the Marvel autograph card, too,” he
added, “I’ll give you another $5. I also expect, because I’m buying so many
cards from you, that you’ll be paying
for half of the shipping costs to send them to me.”
Never have I wanted to strangle someone with my bare hands
more than I did at that moment. All I can say is it’s a good thing we weren’t
standing face to face when he made me the offer or I’d probably be wearing an
electronic ankle-bracelet right about now.
I told him his offer wasn’t even close to being worth all of
my time and effort, and I’d never sell the cards to him for such a small
amount.
He responded with, “Okay, then I guess that’s that!”
And I haven’t heard from him since.
But seeing I already had a bunch of card sets put together
and graded, I decided to list a couple of them on Ebay. They sold for $34.95
each, over 10 times more than what Ron had offered me. I then listed the
autograph card, which sold for $80.
I have found some measure of peace in knowing it probably
was torture for Ron not get his greedy little paws on all of my cards. And I’m
sure he saw the sets I recently listed on Ebay, but didn’t want to bid on them
because it only would have verified just how cheap his offer to me truly was.
So, if I’m not seen in public for a while, it’s because I’ll
be down in the basement, sorting through trading cards...and, if I still need some additional income, growing a crop of mushrooms.
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CLICK HERE===>https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/384106 |
