Why Premium Sports Card Albums are Worth It
By Sal Barry
Previously, I wrote about how storing your cards in nine-pocket pages and three-ring albums is a great way to protect, store and enjoy your collection. But what if you have a really-special set of cards that you want to stand out on your shelf – be it the first set you completed or cards of your favorite player? Or, what if you want a gift for your favorite sports card enthusiast that takes it to the next level? The Premium Sports Card Albums by BCW are an excellent way to protect and showcase your most-cherished cards. Here’s why.
1. Attention-grabbing designs
I started buying sports cards in 1985, so cards from that year hold a special place in my heart. I decided to put my 1985 Topps Football card set in a 3-inch Premium Football Collectors Album, which looks and feels like a football. The cover of the album is textured like a pigskin and the spine is decorated with laces. It’s a great-looking way to store my favorite football card set. The Basketball Collectors Album is textured and colored like a basketball, and the white-and-red Premium Baseball Collectors Album has stitches on it like a baseball. The sleek-looking black Hockey Collectors Album has a spine that is textured like the edge of a puck, while the front and back of the album are smooth like the flat surfaces of a puck.
2. Quality interior
The inside of a Premium Sports Card Album exudes quality. Black felt lines the interior, which looks great and has a nice feel to it, while also giving the inside of the album a little extra padding to protect your cards.
The heavy-duty D-rings are made of black-colored metal to aesthetically fit in with the felt lining. This should go without saying, but all 3-ring albums by BCW are D-ring, meaning that the rings are shaped like the letter D and have the rings offset from the spine. Your typical office supply store album usually has C- or O-shaped rings, which hold less pages and cause the first and last pages in the binder to curl. This, in turn, causes the inner three cards on the page to get curled or bent around the rings. I had this happen to me a few times in my early days as a collector, when I used cheap office supply store binders. D-ring albums store the pages flat, meaning that your cards will also stay flat and undamaged.
3. Holds 90 pages
Premium Sports Card Albums hold 90 card pages for a total of 810 cards. Almost any set, from then or now, will easily fit inside one of these albums. One Premium Album can hold a very large set or numerous smaller sets. For example, a Premium Baseball Card Album can hold a complete 792-card Topps Baseball set from the 1980s or 1990s. A Premium Hockey Card Album can hold two vintage 396-card O-Pee-Chee sets, three or four vintage Topps sets, or modern-era Upper Deck Series One and Two sets plus insert sets. One of these albums can also hold a large chunk of your player or team collection in style.
If you are looking to store your favorite sports cards in an eye-catching way, give one of these Premium Sports Albums a shot.
Sal Barry is the webmaster of the hockey collectibles site PuckJunk.com. Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @puckjunk.
Yes, it makes sense to put your prized collections in a quality binders. I hate when the first or last page sticks to the vinyl binders. Or worse, over time, when the cheaper binder rings bend open and don’t stay aligned. We all hate the gap that allows usually the top or bottom of the pages to slip, or worst of all, pop open.
And having an attractive, yet sturdy binder for our best collections, whether for us to flip through or to show others, matters. If it didn’t, that old shoebox would work just fine.