My 2021 National Recap

What a weekend spent in Chicago at The 2021 National.  One of my bucket list items for quite a while...I was actually on my way to The National 10 years ago when a family emergency forced me to turn around and miss the event.  Didn't miss it this time and had a great and amazing experience.  There are dozens and dozens of other collector reports of The National and I thought I'd also post my thoughts here of my Saturday and Sunday experience.

1. The Donald E. Stephens Convention Center is huge.  It took my brother and I 12 hours to walk and look at every single booth while stopping at about 10-20% of them to look through boxes.  If I was to do it again 3 days would have been perfect.  We walked 9 miles around the convention floor weaving in and out.

2.  The modern-card hobby is in a boom right now for sure as there were a ton of people.  I can't help think the modern cards market is going to collapse in on itself soon with the prices being thrown around.

3.  There is plenty of vintage at The National...don't let the modern-card YouTubers lead you to believe otherwise.

4.  1986-1987 Fleer Jordan rookie cards are not rare, however, they are rare in the PSA 9 and PSA 10.  I could have walked away with 2-3 dozen graded examples PSA8 and below.

5.  Likewise, 1951 Bowman Mantle and Mays rookie cards are not rare either.  Surprising how many The National brings out of the woodworks.

6.  After plenty of research, we ate a big breakfast and brought sandwiches and power bars for lunch and snacks so we didn't have to wait in line and pay the crazy vendor prices.  People always seem to be complaining, but with a little preparation we were just fine and saved all that time.  They did need more tables and chairs around the perimeters though.

7.  I have a good sense of smell and I didn't smell nasty BO until the last day with one of the venders.  Thanks to all the collectors out there for showering.

8.  Absolutely bring good shoes.  My hip flexors were really sore after two days of shuffling on the concrete floor and bending over looking at cases.

9.  The aisleways did get crowded and I did run in a fellow sumo card collector so I was probably guilty of clogging the aisles.  The convention center needs about 15% more space to spread out and give people a bit more room to maneuver in the aisles.

10.  People were really polite as well as the dealers.  I didn't have one negative interaction!

11.  I asked about 6 dealers and they all said they had an amazing show as far as sales.  Money was flying around no doubt.

12. The modern-card YouTubers were out and about, but I very rarely saw them...I only saw their videos afterwards.

13.  People say there were a bunch of kids there and they definitely were, but this hobby and industry really isn't for them anymore.

14.  People carrying lock boxes around with tens of thousands of dollars in slabbed cards is a site to behold.  When it is a 10-year old kid it makes me sad though.

15.  There is plenty of stuff to do: autographs, memorabilia, box breaking, card shopping, dime boxes, dollar boxes, corporate booth festivities.  There is not a shortage of fun.

16.  There were good deals abound, but you had to search.  I was surprised how much inventory was still sitting around at the end of the show leading me to believe the prices were a bit high for most buyers.

17.  Beer at The National.  A brilliant idea designed to pry more dollars out of people's hands.

18.  NASCAR card collecting is dead at the moment.  I saw maybe one or two booths with unopened, but no one was selling any singles.  Soccer, Wrestling, MMA, and F1 have all overtaken NASCAR at this point.  Again it's pretty sad to see how far NASCAR has fallen.

19.  I'm not sure we'd do the VIP Passes again.  Unless you are going to be there all 5 days, it really wasn't worth the price for what we did.

20.  I bought 5 items there...yes only 5 items:

    a)  An unopened taba pack of late 1950 sumo bromide cards!

    b) A box of 1987 Donruss to rip back at the hotel and relive my youth!

    c) A 1990 Donruss Nolan Ryan Learning Series Card

    d) A SGC 7.5 2018 Topps Chrome Ohtani - I wanted to own an SGC slab to have in my collection, but didn't want to spend a ton of money so I rescued this one.

    e) A full set of 1991 Kicks American Taekwondo Association Cards 

Well, there you have it.  Would I go to The 2022 National in Atlantic City?  You bet!

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em - Japanese 1956 Mitsuwa Sumo Wrestling - Yokozuna Tochinishiki

I don't promote smoking and occasionally like a good cigar, but the 1950s were a flamboyant era when smoking was all the rage and fashion.  Did you know that in the 1950s almost half of the Japanese population smoked or consumed tobacco?  In fact, in 1956 the per-capita consumption was over 1400 cigarettes!  That equates to every Japanese man, woman, and child each smoking over 1400 cigarettes in 1956 alone.  Crazy....but I digress.  Sumo wrestlers were not immune to the influence of smoking as captured on one of the only known sumo cards that shows a wrestler smoking.  Here is Yokozuna Tochinishiki having a nice drag in his yukata...given that his chomage is done up, this picture was taken right before or after a match or before a special event. What are your thoughts with tobacco products being "consumed" on trading cards?

Japanese Baseball 1960s Yukata Bolt & Card - Nagashima

Thanks to all that responded and replied in my last post on the 1960 Japanese Yukata Bolt and Sumo Card of Yokozuna Taiho.  Equally as popular in the 1960s were baseball stars Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima and they both promoted yukata companies and adorned several cards attached to these beautifully indigo-dyed fabric bolts.  The bolts allowed the purchasers to make their own yukata patterns and sizes at home.....basically like buying fabric in bulk.  This particular bolt made by Tokyo Yukata features a beautiful jagged herring bone pattern in dark, light, and pale blues although the card of Nagashima shows him wearing a more cross-hatch pattern.

Stay safe everyone!

Japanese Baseball Gurus - Who is this?

My fascination with 1960s Japanese yukata cloth bolts continues.  The ones that I collect have bromide photographs attached to the packaging to show the famous person or star wearing the exact pattern as the actual cloth.  They are pretty cool and so far I've managed to gather about 15 or so of them from the 1960s.  For some unknown reason, they were only produced in the 1960s.

I recently picked this one up and was wondering if any of the Japanese Baseball gurus could tell me who it is.  He is from the Yomiuri Giants...that is about all I can tell at the moment.

German Beer, Aniline, BASF, and Japanese Beauties

If you are reading this you are hopefully intrigued, and if you have gotten this far, maybe you'll read a bit further. (inspired by Shawshank Redemption)

It's no secret that I am enamored by Japanese beauties when they are in the form of 1960s bromides attached to yukata fabric bolts.  In fact, I've become a avid collector of these cards and the cloth they adorn.  This past month, I picked up a very intriguing yukata bolt which ties 1800s German Beer Making, post-war Germany (with ties to Nazi Germany), post-war Japan, and the Japanese entertainment industry together.  Intrigued? I hope so.  Here is the quick "6 Degrees of Separation" of this story.  In the 1800s, the Europeans, especially the Germans, were brilliant beer brewers and chemists.  Friedrich Engelhorn was the son of a beer brewer in the German town of Mannheim.  His early life experiences gave him the knack for metallurgy, business, and the gas industry.  Eventually, while making and bottling gas to sell to pubs for lighting (of course), he also produced tons (literally) of coal tar that he didn't know what to do with.  Along comes William Perkin from England who discovers that you can make brilliantly colored synthetic dies by chemically processing coal tar to get aniline.   Real dies are expensive, synthetic dies not so much, so Friedrich establishes the well-known company Badische Anilin Soda Fabrik (BASF) to produce synthetic dies from all his excess coal tar.  Success gets BASF in trouble though. After BASF merges with 5 other companies in the 1920s to form IG Farben, IG Farben goes on to produce Zyklon B for the Nazi Party which is used in gas chambers for the extreme mass-murder atrocities.  The allies win, IG Farben is dissolved, but BASF remains to produce peaceful chemicals for the European Economy.  Enter post-war Japan.  In the 1960s, both Germany and Japan were enjoying an economic boom.  BASF decides to open up a factory in Japan.  And Japan's boom spreads to the textile industry, especially kimono and yukata.  A need for a synthetic indigo die emerges to color the cotton fabric for the kimono and yukata.  BASF is there to meet the demand and a partnership is born.  The entertainment industry was also thriving in Japan during the 1960s so they helped promote and sell these brilliantly covered fabrics.  Here is how I imagine the story going......the Japanese Women's Club Magazine (A very popular woman's magazine at the time) contacts the Tokyo Main Die Yukata Company to produce these yukata to help with sales of their magazine, the Tokyo Main Die Yukata Company buys the synthetic die from BASF, adorns their high-quality cotton with indigo-colored shrimp, asks a famous actress/singer to promote the product wearing samples of the fabric via a bromide card, secures the card to the fabric, packages it up, sends it to a local shop, puts a ￥980 price on it (about $22.00 at 2018 prices), sells it to their customer.....and 50 years later you have this beautifully crafted and packaged product that now resides in my collection.  I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their week!

1960s Japanese Fabric Beauty

Recently, I've been obsessed with collecting bolts of Japanese yukata and kimono material from the 1960s that have bromides attached to them.  These bromides, usually of famous people, show the cloth being worn by the person to give an idea of what it would look like.  I have quite a few now and need to start cataloguing them.  I picked this "beauty" up off of eBay a few weeks ago....unfortunately, there is no name on the bromide so I don't know which celebrity this is.  Nonetheless, the cloth is made from indigo dye (which all that I have found are) and is a beautiful geometric pattern that fades to different sizes with flowers added in.  The manufacturer placed a sticker with the number "82"...probably to indicate the style. 

Simply beautiful!

1963 Tokyo Yukata Sumo Bromide Cards

Here is another example of more unique and collectible cards that are surfacing every so often.  Enter 1960s Japanese Bromide sumo cards attached to yukata bolts.  Yukata are worn by sumo wrestlers all times of the year and stores sell that same material in bolts to the fans to make their own.  In the 1960s, the patterns were not as intricate so attaching a bromide card to the bolt would let you know which wrestler the material belonged to.  Nowadays, printing technology allows the wrestlers' names to be printed into the actual material pattern, rendering the bromide card unnecessary.  In the 1960s, they not only did this for sumo wrestlers, but other stars as well.  I've seen these cards before, but have not paid serious attention to them until recently.  Having a bolt of the material in hand, as well as the card, is a cool piece of history and a great collectible.  I definitely am hooked...fellow sumo card collector, Paul F., is partially to thank for that!  I have not decided how I am going to categorize them in the 5th edition of my book.....do I give them their own category or do I include them in the BB-series (Black and White Bromide) category?  I have some time to think about it and try to uncover additional cards to see how many are out there.

Here are two bolts I won in the same auction.  I haven't unrolled them (and don't plan on it), but they are probably around 30 feet in length.  You can see them folded up here.  The material and card on the right are Ozeki Tochihikari....the material on the left is attributed to an unknown wrestler.

Here is the inside of the first fold.  You can see the round Tokyo Yukata seal at the bottom.  One of the neat things about Tochihikari's is an attachment for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  I haven't translated that yet to see what it says exactly.

An end on shot here of the bolts....there is a lot of material there!

Thanks to Paul F. for this picture....a bolt that was sold on eBay of Yokozuna Taiho.  You can see the similarity in all the cloth patterns making the bromide very useful and important.




Thanks for stopping by and I hope I am able to share more of these in the future.

Silver Bromide Poisoning - The challenge of 1930s and 1940s BB-Series Black and White Bromide Cards

I'm a completionist when it comes to collecting sumo cards.  I want to get my hands on each and every sumo card made.  I really feel it is the challenge of being able to document and catalog a new set for the first time.  Nothing is more satisfying than reuniting individual cards back into sets which is probably how a good amount of set collectors feel.  This is how I collected back in the 80s and this is how I collect now.  With sumo cards, however, it does present some challenges.  First, my disposable income forces me to pick and choose as I can't have everything, so I have had to prioritize.  Second, the different kinds of sumo menko and cards is vast (believe it or not) and so this economic limitation forced me to get the more common stuff early on in my collecting year.  Now I am left with the "harder" and more expensive stuff.  Alas, if I had them all there would be no need to collect anymore, right?  So I am not complaining.  Lastly, out of all the types of sumo cards out there, the 1930s and 1940s BB-Series Bromide cards are a hot mess.  I say that with fondness for the challenge, but I knew once I seriously dipped my toes in the 1930s and 1940s BB-Series Bromide sumo cards, my sanity would be tested.  Well, now that I am in my second decade of collecting sumo cards, I have come to the realization that the BB-Series sumo cards need some catalog and checklist lovin' and given the respect they really do deserve.  Why the hesitation you ask?  Let me quickly sum up the challenges 1930s and 1940s BB-Series Bromide Cards.

- There are over a hundred different sets (probably, I'm just estimating here) = Lots of auction action = $$$ & ¥¥¥
- Only a small fraction (less than 5) have any company marks = Need to figure out which cards go to which sets

- Blank Backs (see above) = Need to figure out which cards go to which sets based on front design
- Out of a hundred different sets, how many ways can the front design change? = Answer, not a lot in most instances = In-depth study needed to sort them all = time, time, time
- Most were printed prior to WW2 = scarce = beat up = patience for them to come to auction

The 1930s and 1940s BB-series bromides were usually (not always, though) actual photographs.  A few used the halftone printing process.  The term "Bromide" or in Japanese "Buromaido or Puromaido" ”ブロマイド　or プロマイド”　comes from the term 'silver bromide.'  Silver bromide is a yellowish chemical and when mixed with a gelatin was a photographic emulsifier.  Once exposed to light, the silver bromide darkened into metallic silver.  The areas that weren't exposed to light do not change and stay silver bromide.  That is why these bromide cards have a yellowish tint to them in the light areas and silver metallic on the dark areas.  In fact if you hold these card to the light just right, you can see the shiny silver metal reflect the light.

Here are three cards from the BB391: 1939 Black Shikona Bromide Set (Notice the hand-colored tint on two of them).  These came from three different sources over the years.

The unique things about Bromides, which is different from Menko, is that Bromides were meant to be collected and viewed, not used to play the game menko.  So a lot of times they were glued into scrapebooks or pasted into albums and consequently have a lot of back damage.  Here is one such book called a Puromaido Book プロマイドブック.  You can see the slits in the book to insert the Bromides.

It will not be a quick process, but the 4th edition of my book will have a greatly expanded BB-Series section as I will have added many more sets, corrected numerous cataloguing errors, and refined the research in the area.