Editor’s Notes: August 2021 (National Edition)

Each month, content gets updated on the Pre-War Cards site. However, while you see the regular articles that are posted, plenty of stuff is always being added behind the scenes. Much of this has to do with the updating of set descriptions and checklists in the database and each month, I’ll be posting to alert you to stuff that has been added or updated from the previous month.
Here are the items added/updated from the past month.
Time for the monthly check-in — and this one’s all about The National.
The big news this month, obviously, was about the 2021 National Sports Collectors Convention, which just wrapped up on Sunday.
This was my first trip to the annual show and it’s hard to say it disappointed. Now, I didn’t make out like a bandit. But as primarily a pre-war collector, I realized before I went that many of the dealers wouldn’t have stuff I was particularly interested in. All of that said, it was still worth the trip.
Now, I’m not crying poverty, either. This picture here shows my pickups from just Day 2 of the event. I found a decent amount of cards at the show overall. Just not maybe the treasure trove that folks that have a wider collecting scope did.
I met a lot of folks I’d known only online and it was great connecting with them. And in addition to the ones I knew beforehand, I met a whole slew of folks that I didn’t know but that knew of me or the website. That was just very cool.
I’ll be covering my pickups from the show in a separate post but in addition to one big card I’d been after for a while, I found all sorts of set hits, some oddities, and some nicely-priced bargains.
Stuff there, by and large, was not priced to sell. At least from a pre-war vantage point. I didn’t find the card prices outrageous by any means but it was not a haven for bargains, either. But that’s all due to the current market. Folks are in a buying mood and it clearly showed. I made it a point to ask every dealer that had pre-war that I came across how they were doing and, to a person, all said they were having a fantastic show.
That might seem like it would be a pretty typical answer but that’s hardly the case. Dealers are generally pretty honest about that sort of question and I’ve been at plenty of shows where dealers said they were having only a so-so show in terms of sales — or even a downright rotten one. Sales seemed to be brisk for just about all of the dealers.
In all, it was an incredible three days. You can spend your time in worse cities than Chicago and the show was a convenient short drive from many hotels. I’ll definitely be trying to get to another one in the future.
New Sets Added to the Site
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