I grew up collecting baseball cards. They were my first passion. It was an exciting hobby because every pack initiated a quest.
It wasn’t that I cared much for the game but I was just an inveterate collector, especially of the rarer cards. My Dad would take a much-needed day off work and take me to baseball card shows where I would wander for hours looking for the best deals on the strangest cards: like the Michael Jordan Upperdeck baseball card. Which today is probably worth less than the cardboard it’s embossed on.
Naturally this obsession with baseball cards evolved into an obsession with books and reading, an evolution only a true dilettante could appreciate. So it stands to reason that now, a grown dilettante man mildly nostalgic for childhood, I would demand more literary trading cards!
And so I discovered poetry trading cards, which is a great start. What do you think Rumpus? Rumpus trading cards?
On a related note, this awesome literary magazine Diagram sells a full deck of cards, each of which is designed by Diagram contributors.
