In The Zone

UPDATE: Unfortunately, Dave has put out notice that the shop will close 31 Dec 2023.  

In recapping my card hunting in the various shops, flea markets, shows, and antique malls in Michigan, I'm not going to go in chronological order, nor am I going to cover every card.  Mostly because I don't remember exactly and am lucky to keep straight what I got where.

The Collector's Zone, 1425 Wildwood Ave, Jackson, MI wasn't our first visit, but it was pretty early in the week.  It's paired with a jewelry store, and has a large selection of comic and gaming materials along with cards.  My host Stuart and I had been there a couple times before.  The proprietor, Dave, is always friendly and willing to negotiate pricing.  He doesn't organize and store everything perfectly, but believes in just having it all available for customers to dig through.  But it's relatively neat compared to some shops we've been to.

He had a few boxes of new arrivals on the tables (in the right part of the photo) that we dug through first.  I found several football set needs in there.  One box was all vintage baseball, including a lot of '62 Topps, which will become a recurring theme in these posts.  We also found a few other odd baseball items that hit some of my other lists.

I'm leisurely collecting the 2011 sparkly legends...the Gullett is an OPC upgrade...Mattingly is a set need....Nettles is the Craig back variation.  The others are the start of my official set build, before it became official.  More on that in a later post.

Dave also had a couple boxes of the typical shiny football I kept running into at about every shop we visited.  I tried hard to meticulously pick these out and not get anything I already had.  And then I went back through them and put back the duplicates.  Of course, I missed one as you can see.  (Hint: third row).  The first row of Bowman are all serial numbered except for the last one.

One of the more unusual finds was among several stacks of non-sport cards.  I have been looking for sets or boxes of this particular set for a while.  Most of the time the boxes are outrageous, and actually very impractical since this is only a 40 card set.  I keep thinking these are from the '90s, but they're actually 2008 PopCardz.  The above photo is not mine, I snagged it off the internet to save time.

Here is a sample back.  The info is rather whimsical, but interesting.  As you might guess, I just got them for the gorgeous gals.  I don't even know who a few of the dudes even are.

Here are my top picks.  I threw in Anton since he was in the alternate universe Star Trek movies.  But the women outnumber the men by about three to one in the checklist.  Perfect!

So as we were settling up, I mentioned to Dave that I was an aspiring Priest Holmes collector.  He said he had something I would like and pulled this out:

It's 5 x 8 inches and is a deluxe addition to the other two I have that are just plain red or white swatches.  This one's a sick patch that appears to me to be the upper left corner of his nameplate (the bottom of the H in Holmes) and the top corner of the 3, all turned 90°.  What a surprising find that was!

We actually returned a day or two later to see what else we could dig up, but I don't recall which of this stuff I got on which trip.  Thanks again to Dave.