I have a pile of these wood postcard holders that I bought at the 100 Yen shop years ago and recently pulled out of a box in a closet. I thought I would try using them to decorate a section of wall in the extra room so I've been doing a bit of experimenting to see how they look with vintage Japanese baseball cards on them.
One thing I have always disliked about displaying old baseball cards is the plastic. If you want to display cards its likely you are going to display good (ie valuable) cards which you need to keep in plastic holders or sleeves. This gives them an anachronistic look - vintage cards weren`t meant to be kept in plastic holders, which weren`t even a thing back when they came out.
Sometimes old cards need to breathe, they need to be naked. Not just for their own sake, but for the benefit of those of us looking at them.
That said, I`m not crazy. My expensive cards are all in plastic holders, protected from the elements. But for a display I wanted to put some cards up just on their own, free of any plastic.
I have a fair number of doubles of older Calbees. A lot of them are low grade with damage that makes them quite low value, but they still look decent. These are a perfect match. If they fall off of there and get a dinged corner....well, their corners are already dinged. And they look great.
1970s Calbees, and a big Yamakatsu DX card of Koichi Tabuchi, are pretty good for this sort of thing. They are basically action photos which look cool on their own, unadorned. I'm not so sure that American cards from the 70s - mostly posed shots in spring training facilities surrounded by significant border designs - would look as good. As you can see I put some 1970s Pepsi Dragons Menko with their colorful backdrops up there too for comparison but I don't think they look as nice as the photo cards of Calbee and Yamakatsu and I might give that space over to more of those.
I like it when I can find uses for things that don't seem to have much value, so I think this is kind of neat. Damaged cards are actually better than mint cards for this sort of thing, and I'm now scouring my collection for more of them.
This is really cool. I've thought about doing something similar in my office.
ReplyDeleteThat Yamakatsu DX of Tabuchi looks great on display. I've got several of those cards in a big plastic holder that I never look at - I could display one or two of them like this and rotate them.
I highly recommend it, these 1970s sets fit perfectly into that "not too expensive that you need to obsess about their condition" while also "Look great displayed outside of plastic" range. Most of the Calbees I put up there came from a lot that have tape stains on the back and are basically not worth anything, but look nice on the front.
DeleteI still have those massive Jumbo Yamakatsu DX cards that you gave me and I'm thinking of making space for them too (I just need bigger postcard holders, the Tabuchi I have up there now is one of the more "medium" size ones).
I should have realized that wasn't one of the mongo cards with the difference in size of it with the Calbee cards above it
DeleteVery cool card displays. I used to hang cards up in my office, but even with blinds and drapes, it gets too much sunlight. I made the mistake of hanging up my San Jose Sharks autographs and a lot of them faded within a few years.
ReplyDeleteOh no, that sucks about your Sharks autos. I've learned the same difficult lesson. I have a bunch of 1980 Topps cards (Reggie Jackson, Johnny Bench, Rod Carew - all of them stars) displayed on a shelf in my office. They are in a location out of direct sunlight so I thought they would be safe, but they must be getting some reflected light on them since over the years they have faded quite badly and are pretty much worthless now. Its one of those types of damage that sneaks up on you - by the time you notice its happened its already too late to take them down!
DeleteWith the display in this post I've put them in a location that is shady and doesn't get any natural light, so hopefully they'll be good (guess we'll find out in 5 years!)
They do look really good out like that, especially the big one. There's a lot of humidity here in TN, so I can't leave cards out very long, but I do sometimes display a couple on my desk (at home) for a few days at a time during the winter when there's less moisture in the air.
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