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New Princeton Museum

Since 2020, the Princeton Art museum has been under construction for remodeling and expansion. Definitely long overdue but I’ve missed it since the in-town exhibitions have frequently felt sort of incomplete. When the museum finally reopened last October I immediately visited a couple times and had grand plans for publishing my thoughts sometime in November.

Oh well. Life had other plans and this just kept getting pushed back and back. But it’s done now so better late than never.

The new museum features many exciting improvements (and of course a few complaints). We’ll start with the building itself which puts the galleries all on one floor and does this wonderful thing on the entry floor where a lot of the hallways feel like outdoor spaces complete with a rougher wall texture.

The entry floor is not gallery space but rather public access. The museum store is here as well as a few lecture halls and a reception hall. You’re in the museum but still feel like you’re outside it. This is both very cool while highlighting probably the biggest problem with the museum—namely that its footprint does not fit the Princeton grid.

One of the coolest things about the Princeton campus is how explorable it is. Most buildings aren’t large and those that are are either pieced by first floor pedestrian passageways or are grouped around a courtyard so they aren’t actually as large as they look. This makes the campus a place where you’re always finding new routes and rarely have to walk around anything. Lots of fun to wander at night or during break when no one’s around.

The art museum construction disrupted the center of campus by forcing everyone to walk all the way around the site. The new museum maintains the disruption as the only large building you can’t walk through. This is a shame since it sits in the middle of everything. The hallways inside suggest that at one point it was intended to be more open but those are now hidden behind doors, many of which feel like you’re sneaking into the building rather than following a logical path through campus.

Anyway, the museum galleries themselves were a lot of fun to visit and I loved seeing artwork that I was familiar with displayed in fresh new ways. The only entry-level gallery is the “Welcome Gallery” whose special exhibition dedicated to Toshiko Takaezu treats her not only as an American artist* but one who was in conversation with multiple other famous American modern artists—many of whom are also on display in the gallery so that the connections are eplicit..

*Born in the Territory of Hawaii, taught at Princeton for 25 years…

I very much appreciate the sigh of relief it allowed me to take immediately upon seeing the new museum. It’s as sure a sign as anything that this was a very different, much improved museum from what it used to be when Takaezu was sequestered in the basement as a Showa-era artisan.

The rest of the museum consists of a single main floor above the entry level. The most obvious change here is in the hallways between the galleries—especially the landing around the stairwell—where the museum mixes periods and locations in order to display items that have similar themes.

A wall of portraits old and new including some by Titus Kaphar which combine old and new. A Kwakwaka’wakw panel carved by Rande Cook is paired with a similarly-colored Mark Rothko. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe is next to a 14th century panel of Mary with Jesus by Giovani di Tano Fei.

This is super exciting since it acknowledges how new artists are inspired by everyone and that it does no one any good to silo art by geographic location. It also highlights how certain subjects from portraits to still lifes to landscapes are universal.

The wall of still lifes is a particularly great example of this approach since it contains different media, geographic sources, and time periods—among them an early-20th century Korean screen by Baik Yoon Moon, 18th century French oils by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and 20th century photographs by Ruth Barnhart—yet when seen all together it’s immediately obvious about what’s going on.

Interestingly, only one of the hallway thematic hangs is listed as a special exhibition. That exhibition is the Face to Face hallway and is also a very good example of what the museum is doing and how it’s taking a lot of art out of the non-white artists basement and mixing everything together.

I really like seeing Ana Mendieta next to a 16th century German woodcut but the pairing of Liu Dan with Guercino is one of the best validations of the museum’s new approach. The entire point of the Liu Dan’s work is that it’s both Chinese and Western and both old and modern and exists in a world where things can’t be categorized easily anymore.

I suspect that most of my future visits to the museum will consist of exploring the hallways and seeing what new mashups they’ve done. I’ll be very sad if those don’t rotate pretty regularly and things get static since the permanent collection rooms have a tendency to take the permanent part very literally.

The permanent galleries were what I was least interested in seeing in the new museum but much to my surprise I really enjoyed how they have been revamped. The European Gallery has the biggest change here as the curators make the statement that art which is a product of trade and colonialism is inherently European.

There’s an entire wall of paintings and photographs of non-European subjects by European artists which quietly highlights* the colonial view of the world and the way that travel images behave in this context. Really nice to see these as a mix of media and time period too since the argument includes that this has been going on for centuries.

*I didn’t even notice any wall text explaining why these were all together.

The central spine of the galleries goes even further and features art made outside Europe which ended up in European collections. The Yoruba spoon handle is an example of the kind of thing that showed up in collections all over Europe in the sixteenth century. A gold Peruvian cup is accompanied by a long description of how it was associated with Montezuma for centuries thanks to the Spaniard who sold it to the British.* A nineteenth century Indian ewer combines an Indian form with British-themed inlays to create a hybrid artifact.

*There’s a similar discussion around Manet’s Women with a Cigarette and all the different ways it’s been titled with various non-French ethnicities assigned to the woman because she has dark skin. The overarching argument is that the way the art was used and framed in Europe is just as interesting as the art itself.

In all of these cases, while the art is from other continents, that they were marketed to, collected, and traded by Europeans gives them a European context and makes the European rooms much more interesting by acknowledging how global trade passed through Europe for centuries. This is particularly highlighted by a wall which displays objects related to various commodities such as coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, and chocolate and includes wall text about how each of those were used to justify colonization and enslavement.*

*Reminding me of a fantastic little exhibition at Stanford about sugar which combined high tea ceramic sugar bowls, portraits of the plantation owners, and documents about the conditions of the slaves.

The American—really United States—galleries aren’t as dramatic but are much more explicit about the changes they’ve made. Slavery and indigenous genocide are quietly included as part of the background information for almost all the artwork.* The big portrait of George Washington at the Battle of Princeton remains as the official welcome image but it’s paired with a bust of Washington by Alan Michelson titled Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer).

*For example, the Boidinot collection wall text: “Assembled over several generations, the collection is unusual for its breadth and extent, reflecting a family’s shifting tastes and circumstances, the latter shaped by religion, race, and politics. Of Huguenot descent, the Boudinots came to America following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV of France, which had allowed Protestants to practice their religion without state persecution. The family later settled in Antigua but returned to the mid-Atlantic around 1736 under threat of a planned rebellion of enslaved Africans working the island’s sugar plantations. Elias Boudinot IV (1740–1821) apprenticed with Princeton lawyer Richard Stockton, whom his sister Annis had married. Elias served in the Continental Army and the Continental Congress, where he advocated the abolition of slavery, a lifelong conviction carried into his final role as founding president of the American Bible Society.”

I love the grouping even though it’s very clear that despite the wall text highlighting the connection, the general momentum of the museum docents and visitors doesn’t give a shit. I listened to a tour stop at the Washington portrait and spend ten minutes talking all about it, his greatness, and all the Princeton connections (literally the same talk I remember receiving a decade ago). The docent then mentioned the bust next to it, said nothing about what it was or who had made it, and then handwaved it away as, “this is how curators try to start conversations” while leading the tour group away after 30 seconds.

The rest of the rooms have a lot going on. On the other side of the Washington portrait is a set of casta paintings by Buenaventura José Guiol so the idea that we’re going to be looking at race relations throughout the galleries is very clearly set up. There’s a large jar by Dave the Potter. A photo by Renee Cox restaging the signing of the Constitution is paired with a neoclassical sofa from the early 19th century. Contemporary photos and drawings of the Civil War are displayed with work by Kara Walker.

Native Americans are also just mixed in with everything else. Depictions of Natives by white artists to document a “dying race” are combined with depictions of whites by Natives which were sold to sustain themselves. Objects from the Arts and Crafts movement are paired with objects that demonstrate the commodification of native craft. All and all a lot of fun to see and much much more interesting than these galleries were in the old museum.

Compared to the European and American rooms, the Asian rooms are much much more straightforward—mainly because the museum isn’t making an argument about colonialism or including art which they had previously not considered part of Asia. There’s still a huge improvement though in how these rooms are no longer centered around the idea of being “ancient” and include a large amount of contemporary work which is no longer being forced into the ancient framing.*

*I mentioned this earlier with Tokaezu’s work but all the Asian art in the old museum was dated as being part of an era or period rather than being given a year. eg. modern Japanese art was “Showa-era” or “Heisei-era” rather than being 1926–1989 or 1989–2019.

Much of the contemporary work now is referencing the past by either using a traditional form with contemporary subjects or a contemporary form using traditional subjects. These make sense in a room where they can be in conversation with the older works and you can see how the traditions are being referenced.

There are also photographs and things by Asians traveling abroad which suggest a future display very similar to the ones in the European galleries except with the roles reversed.

The last set of dedicated galleries was the modern art wing. These were a wonderfully diverse with modern artists from all over the world. Yayoi Kusama and El Anatsui are no longer in the basement and they’re joined by many other people as part of a global modern art curriculum with people like Suki Seokyeong Kang, Ellen Gallagher, and Cara Romero along with the usual mid-century Modern Art classics. Very cool to see these rooms as continuing to evolve rather than getting stuck in that mid-century period.

If I have any complaint here it’s in the fact that much of this gallery is in the “make it fucking large” school of modern art which always feels like a display of the art market rather than the art itself.

Moving out of the four big galleries takes us to the weaker parts of the museum. I think this is more a function of the museum’s collections rather than a curatorial choice but it’s still worth mentioning.

Besides the hallways and big galleries there are numerous spaces where the hallways open up and art is on display. These are almost all dedicated to art from Africa, Latin America, and Native America and are the closest to what the old museum used to be in that things are on display without much information or commentary.

The Latin America room is particularly noticeable here* in how it feels very much like looking at someone’s collection without any real information about how and why these pieces were chosen. There’s more of a warehouse feel where the space is more an accumulation of things rather than a curated collection.

*Not as much as ancient Rome which I didn’t even spend time in since it felt no different from before. Though I do have to admit that the new in-floor mosaics are very nice.

This warehouse feel extends to many parts of the museum including a few spaces in the big galleries where objects are just crammed into a display. Some of this is to have objects which aren’t On Display™ still be visible* but other times it’s clearly a choice prioritizing the appearance of the display over education. The “world in miniature” display in the Asian rooms is particularly bad here in that it’s a mishmash of time periods, cultures (some not even Asian), and uses with the single unifying concept being the size of the piece.

*Akin to the mezzanine level in the American wing of the Met.

In some of the warehouse cases there’s not even any identifying text aside from a QR code which assumes that you have internet access. Which I did not since my cell phone does badly deep inside thick concrete walls, there’s no visitor wifi, and I don’t have access to eduroam.

It’s not all bad though. The Africa collection is in one of those wide-hallway gallery spaces and is similar to the Asian room in how it focuses on newer work which exists as an extension of traditional works. Many of the items on display are from the last 100 years. I especially liked the photography of Z.J.S. Ndimande & Son as well as Hugh Hayden’s work.

Hayden is interesting because he’s a Texan who’s also on display in the American galleries but because he’s working in discussion with African art also fits in the Africa rooms.

This gallery is still sort of unfocused though and I suspect that the way it feels like a hallway is part of the problem.

The Native American art is similar. There’s stuff—some of it nice—but over all feels a bit like an afterthought. This is a shame since the museum is also doing some cool stuff and putting objects on display which haven’t even been fully cataloged.* This is neat to see and I enjoyed learning a little about how the museum actually works.

*anything with a label number starting in “ui” hasn’t been fully researched by the museum to confirm that the information about them is accurate.

There are two special exhibitions along with the new museum in general. I didn’t spend enough time in the photography one to write about it. The other is a large one called Princeton Collects which, while I can see the rationale behind it, felt completely redundant to the rest of the museum.

The nature of most museums is that they say a lot about themselves because of how they rely on donations in order to fill the collection. Princeton in particular is like this—especially in the collections from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Those collections—both their strengths and weaknesses—say more about Princeton than the objects and every time I’ve walked through those galleries in both the old and new museums I’ve wondered about the alumni who acquired and donated everything.

The Princeton collects galleries are more of the same but are displayed all together in a way that encourages light browsing where I was stopped by art I recognized such as Huang Yan* or something new that caught my eye like the photography of Zanele Muholi. The only takeaway I could discern was “isn’t Princeton great because it has all this art”—one of the same points that the museum as a whole has already.

*Who I saw at San José year ago.

If this exhibition were in one of the downtown gallery spaces as a way of bringing a sample of the museum into the community I’d totally understand it. But in the museum itself located in a room all the way at the back after you’ve already walked through the entire museum? There’s nothing really new it can add this way.

Which about wraps things up. Overall a massively exciting and promising direction. Yes there’s room for improvement but the trend is positive. I’m deeply happy that it’s back and look forward to returning many times. I expect that future special exhibitions will be a lot more interesting.

Specific things

The last part of this post will be noting specific things that I liked just by themselves.

The display case of Zhang Hongtu’s work which grouped it with his Zhou dynasty, Qing dynasty, Dutch, and modern influences was a wonderful little stand-alone exhibit that demonstrates what’s so exciting about the new direction the museum is going.

A print in the European gallery of six nude female figures caught my eye because it’s presented as an aid for painters but is really about that fantastic time in the early years of photography where its place as a tool is still being figured out. Fascinating to see how it replaced quick figure sketches and became a key ingredient to a painter’s toolkit. It’s also obvious to me that these are CdVs and could just as easily be sold and collected as prints on their own since girlie images have been one of the photography’s core competencies from day one.

I love seeing Michael Menchaca’s La Raza Cosmica* since it’s a beautiful series of prints that mixes classic designs with modern ideas. I do wish it was tied in more with the casta images on display in the American gallery rather than being in a wide spot in the hallway.

*This link goes to the full set which is not listed as on display. The different but similar set on display is catalogued print by print.

There’s a wonderful alcove dedicated to a display of the backs of paintings and the kind of information that conservators find and look for there. From annotations by artists, owners and past conservators to the structural supports and fingerprints left over from creating the art there’s so much more going on than what actually gets displayed. This is a fantastic use of a teaching museum and it’s great that the public is also allowed to see this kind of thing.

Dadamaino’s L’Alfabeto della mente is cool as hell just by itself but seeing it as an emotional response to tragedy, “full of anger and powerless pain,” is especially poignant both with its connection to Palestinian lives lost and the larger state of the world today.

And finally there are a few moments where the architecture of the museum itself has a chance to shine. From windows which let the beauty of Princeton’s campus be part of the museum to little nooks which feel like site-specific installations,* it’s just nice to be reminded that you’re not trapped in a windowless concrete box.

*eg Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s Naga which feels like Calder lite but really fits its own dedicated space.

October Backlog

Continuing from September.

Cool pickup roundup

Time for another round of cool pickups.

I’ve had the 1910 Helmar Hawaiian Islands card on my searchlist since before I got my first cards from this set almost three years ago. It doesn’t pop up often and when it has has been stupidly expensive. When I got the notification about this one at like $3 it was an instant purchase.

It’s a bit of a shame that there is no image of Hawai‘i on this card and that it just features the seal. But the gold ink and bright colors make this an attractive addition to the binder. And, aside from the Joker on the playing card deck this is the first Hawaiian Seal card in the collection at all.

From the same seller I also grabbed a 1910 Hassan Animal Series card of a Porcupine. Not a set I’m collecting and from what I can tell there aren’t even any animals in it which fit any of my collections. It’s just a nice large colorfult set and I liked the Porcupine artwork with the way all the quills look..

This is the design variant with generic backs instead of descriptive text. I’m a little sad that I don’t get to see what we thought of the animal in 1910 but there’s something kind of appealing about such a large advertisement too.

The 1934 R72 Schutter-Johnson “I’m Going to Be” card which I picked up last summer is in fact a graded copy. It’s currently on the bookshelves over my desk along with my Lewis Baltz card—the only two cards I have on display. When Anson sent me back my TTM return he included a raw copy along as a thank you for the honor of being named the 2025 Burdick Award winner. This is very cool since it means I can have it in my binders as well.

I figured I may as well scan the back this time as well. Not much to report but the “I’m Going to Be” text is a lot of fun.

I’ve been searching for Jim Lonborg’s 1969 Richfield Atlantic card for a while now. These 8×10 oversized cards are always fun to add to the binder and this one means that the Doug Camilli Volpe print isn’t the only such card in there now.

The back has a nice long bio which is mostly about his recovery from injury but includes a bit about his 1967 season as well as his time at Stanford. It is unfortunate that he ended up hurting his shoulder while compensating for his knee injury and never regained the form he had in 1967.

The same seller had a few of these Greater Boston Sports Collectors Club cards available. Not something I search for but they’re the kind of fun card I enjoy adding when I come across them. I’m also increasingly a sucker for cards like the Lonborg which alter an old design and turn it into something new—in this case replacing the Dan·Dee logo with GBSCC’08.

These are both fake-aged with a print screen being applied to the white areas. They did a nice job on the fronts by also altering the white point of the photos to match. The backs with their fake grey card stock are a bit weirder since the GBSCC branding is still in a true white box.

I picked up a cheap signed Hall of Fame postcard of Monte Irvin. I’m not collecting collecting these but I can’t turn them down when they pop up at a good price. This is printed by Curteichcolor who were in charge of the cards from 1964–1980. Since Irvin was elected to the Hall in 1973, this was obviously printed in the 1973–1980 range.

This postcard was also a lot of fun to find. It’s a great minor league oddball from 1993 but just looking at the front it actually appears much older. It also reminds me of going to see the Tacoma Tigers play this year and, not only getting Boone’s autograph, but learning the value of always carrying a spare baseball.

I’ve been slowly stalking the last few Topps and Bowman cards that I need. The list is almost exclusively Willie Mays but includes a few high numbers such as this 1963 Orlando Cepeda. This is an area where patience will eventually win out although there are still a few 1967 high numbers where even the cheapest ones I find are solidly in the “there’s no way I’d enjoy this for the price” because they represent common players.

Getting an Orlando Cepeda though is a lot more fun. Especially when it completes a run of his Giants cards (well aside for the 1963 Home Run Leaders card) and is a great one to end on. The follow-through with the bat aimed at the camera lens may be my favorite photo pose and the way the background of this photo is processed really makes it pop.

The 1953 Sam Calderone high number was another one off that list and, as one of the few non-Hall of Famers, gives me hope that the 1967 high numbers might pop up cheap eventually. I just Willie Mays (LOL as if) and Hoyt Wilhelm (still plausible) to complete the team set now. Calderone played for the Giants in 1950, spent a couple of years in the military, and then rejoined the team in 1953. This is his only Giants card as he was traded to the Braves before the 1954 season.

I grabbed an ink blotter promoting Wampole’s Creo-Terpin for the Stanford album because it features Marjorie Gestring and her 1936 Olympic Gold Medal. This blotter is generally desirable for the Jesse Owens inclusion but featuring four Americans makes it a nice piece in general.* Is interesting that the other athletes are British, Dutch, and German** and I’m wondering how that choice was made given that this seems to be an American product advertised to Americans.

*I’ve obviously blogged about Jesse Owens a couple times. And Hardin and Meadows both show up as record holders on the Stanford–USC track program.

**Yeah I’m not happy about the swastika making its first appearance in my collection but this is a case where the card has enough context to make me okay with it plus it makes the point that it was the general German flag at this time.

The artwork on this is very cool too with all the athletes being in silhouette and their uniforms being unprinted paper. It results in a very neat and graphic effect that I really like.

Creo-Terpin was an expectorant made of creosote (among other things) that has now been found to be not exactly the safest thing to give children. Wampole’s produced a bunch of different blotters featuring subjects from birds to military ranks to prominent inventors. All of them feature a location for a local druggist—in this case Schumann’s Drug Store in Hunter, New York— to stamp their business address.

And I’ll wrap up this post with a 1933 Goudey Red Lucas meta card since it’s a very red card of a Red named Red. It and the Calderone came from an ebay seller who was running a buy-one, get-one sale which made them reasonable purchases for me. I’d’ve liked to have gotten the Tattoo Orbit Red Red Lucas but those aren’t anywhere near what I’d like to spend on this kind of silly thing.

Cross Country

Only one boy in cross country this year as my youngest decided to do fall ball instead. Nice to be familiar with most of the routes now after everything was brand new last year. We even got to go to a few new locations including a trip up to Wappingers Falls for NXR.

A very successful season though with Varsity and JV boys and girls all winning their league. A very deep team with everyone making significant progress on their personal records and it’s been a lot of fun to not only see how much all the kids improved but how well they became a team.

Of course

I sort of expected this to happen but the very first business day after I published my Christmas Cards post I received another one in the mail. Inside there was a very nice note from San Jose Fuji as well as a handful of cards.

The first two cards were Giants cards which I’m assuming came from this year’s Topps Advent calendars. Those seemed like a product that would’ve been a ton of fun at half the price they were being sold at. The plaid parallel cards are a nice color match for the A’s and a nice thematic match for the Mariners but I don’t see the need for them to exist for any other teams.

The diecut insert sets are a lot more interesting in that one-off way where I can’t see wanting a bunch of but definitely enjoy being able to add an example to the binder. The Verlander Evergreen kind of looks like it should smell like an air freshener. I appreciate that it fits in a standard binder page unlike the megabox ornament inserts. The Nice List inserts are also a bit awkward albeit still fun. It’s always great to add a Tyler Rogers though. I’m sad that he’s no longer a Giant.

The other two cards were a pair of Stanford autographs from the 2015 Panini Stanford University set. It’s nice that both of these are guys who played a couple of seasons in the NFL. Neither lit the league on fire but this is an area of Stanford collection which I haven’t really explored much at all. The Alumni PC is primarily baseball but I’m slowly adding NBA/WNBA/NFL players from the past couple decades.

Very cool stuff. Thanks Mark!

Fall TTMs

Grouping Fall TTMs together because I’ve basically stopped sending out requests due to the combination of running out of cards to send out and the ever-increasing price of forever stamps.

I didn’t keep track of the time for this card since it’s the first TTM request I’ve made to someone I consider a friend. But Anson won SABR’s Burdick award this year and I was honored to create a custom of him. This is in the style of one of his favorite sets and it looks great with the gold ink.

It’s been a lot of fun to make the annual card of the Burdick Winner and I’m so happy to have a signed version of each of them.

Spring Training returns continue to trickle in and surprise me. This one from Keaton Winn came back in 245 days. Yes he did keep one of the customs. He only pitched in 7 games this year but was mostly reliable. He has a big opportunity this coming season though with the Giants pitching staff being somewhat weak and open to anyone who has a good spring.

Another Spring Training return came in at 258 days. Trenton Brooks made his MLB debut with the Giants last year but signed with the Padres last fall. He played 25 games in the Majors last year, not exactly lighting things up but he did hit his first career home run. He did a lot better in AAA and has chosen to try free agency again this winter.

He kept one custom and added a signed 2024 Rivercats card to the envelope so that was very cool.

The last return of fall was this fantastic one from Candy Maldonado. This was a request I sent out in 2020 after I scanned and printed all my childhood Giants Magazine covers. I always loved this photo with the candy bat and you can see how beat up the cover was due to how often I was rereading these in my first year of being a baseball fan.

I was obviously no longer expecting this back as it’s my new longest return clocking in at 1906 days for the round trip.

I had sent a couple other cards in the request as well. Really fun to add another Mother’s Cookies card to the binder. These are always a joy to get signed and they usually look great due to their simple design.

I’ll send a bunch of customs out again for Spring Training but since my requests have sort of dried up the only ones I’ll be getting are likely to be long-time stragglers. Maldonado takes me to having five that were out for over two years: Terry McGriff in 1582 days, Al Osuna in 840 days, Mike Laga in 787 days, and Max Venable in 785 days.

Fall Ball

Our first season in Babe Ruth on a full-sized field. All games are at night where there’s barely enough light for my camera so a lot of the photos are grainy black and white as a result. Pretty low key competition—to the point where we had to cancel a bunch of games due to lack of players despite carrying a 17-player roster—so it’s been a lot of fun and a great way for the younger kids to get used to things.

I was also surprised to learn that the field in Hamilton where we played a handful of our games is the original Babe Ruth Field* because the organization itself was formed in Hamilton back in 1951. Fun to be at the origin of things that way.

*Bonacci Field in Switlik Park in Hamilton.

The Hamilton organization is beginning plans for fixing it up for the 75th anniversary of Babe Ruth baseball. Sadly it doesn’t look like we’ll be a part of that since our Babe Ruth league looks to have died. I just got an email from our Little League asking for older kids to sign up since there would be no Babe Ruth this Spring.

Christmas Cards

Going to finish off the year by consolidating all the cards I’ve received as part of the holidays into one big post.

The first is a surprise zapping from Kenny with a fun quad relic of Glenn Otto. Kenny’s willingness and ability to get cards like this signed continues to amaze me since I can barely scrounge up a common of guys like this when I’ve gone autographing.

While Otto did eventually play in Somerset he never made it to Major League Baseball as a Yankee. He did however end up playing three seasons with the Astros. Two of those weren’t so great but his 2022 was a perfectly respectable 27 starts averaging 5 innings per start and a 0.6 WAR total.

A week after the Otto envelope arrived I received a second envelope from Kenny, this time with seven signed 2013 Bowman cards* inside. None of these guys made it to the Majors—heck most of them didn’t even make it to Trenton—though Fu-Lin Kuo has had a long career in the Chinese league while Ericson Leonora has had a similarly long career in the Italian league.

*To accompany their Chrome versions from earlier.

A fully-stuffed PWE from Kerry at Cards on Cards had a lot of cool stuff for my interests with nine out of the ten cards being Card cards. the four 1980s oddballs are things I’m passively collecting. I love the 1984 Nabisco/Cereal cards since they remind me of a bunch of cards I got in a repack like 35 years ago. Same with the two Star Stickers cards which were one of my favorite oddball releases when I was a kid.

The other six cards are all Stanford guys. Julius Barnes and Davis Mills are both new to the binder. I remember Barnes from my peak years of following Stanford basketball so adding him is a lot of fun and corrects an oversight. It’s also nice to add a proper national-release Sasaki card to go next to the one from Trenton. It’s interesting that that card doesn’t assign a team to him at all but is able to mention Stanford in the back text.

The Collect-a-Books John Elway is a lot of fun. It’s from 1990 just like the Baseball ones but is distributed through a different company. I’ve never seen a football one so it’s fun to compare the insides to the baseball insides. A lot more biographical information and a lot more photos (including a two-panel spread). Also fun to notice the JBC copyright and patent pending and be reminded that this was a Jim Bouton invention.

Finally, the Quinn Mathews is a card I’ve been looking for all year (the paper version is in my COMC pile). Really nice to finally have one in hand and seeing him as the venn diagram intersection of this mixed Cardinals/Cardinal batch has me thinking about guys in the PC who played professionally for the same mascot (or close enough) that they played college ball. Steve Dunning and Frank Duffy both come to mind for the Indians era while Chad Hutchinson, John Gall, Mike Wodnicki, Tommy Edman and Stephen Piscotty all fit the bill for the Cardinal era.

I got a very nice real holiday card from Anson at Pre-war Cards. Inside were three pre-war cards that he’d selected for me. The first is this wonderful card of Aurora Borealis from the 1910 T30 Hassan Arctic Scenes set. Kind of a ridiculously nice-looking card actually which is really interesting to compare to the way it’s depicted in the Romance of the Heavens set. This kind of thing also hits different after getting just a taste of what it’s like to see this in person.

I can’t find this exact card in TCDB but a version of it with a different company on the back suggests that this is a 1924 release of flag girls from various countries. Yes I’ve discussed the problems with this flag before. On this card it’s a little less of a problem since while it’s a set of flag girls the emphasis is as much on the costume and everything else and the flag is somewhat secondary.

The last card from Anson was this Lion Coffee card from ~1901. No idea if it’s earlier or later than the other Lion cards that Anson has sent me but with this much fancier back I would’ve made the connection to the Kona Coffee brand a lot faster

Dating this card is somewhat interesting since it seems to suggest that John Griggs is the Governor and he was only in office from 1895–98. The election information from the bottom is much more conclusive since it’s from the 1900 Presidential election in which New Jersey did indeed have 401,050 votes. The 56,889 plurality represents the margin of victory as McKinley won the state with 221,707 votes to William Jennings Bryan’s 164,808.

The weekend after Christmas I received a massive bubble mailer from Marc Brubaker who has clearly been building me a pile for a long long time. I just sorted these by year instead of by theme this time and am starting off with assorted older cards.

I always appreciate getting any O Pee Chee cards. While I’ve made sure to get the ones that demonstrate trades the rest of them have been the kind of thing that I don’t actively search for. Even though as a kid I was captivated by the white card stock and how much cleaner they looked compared to regular Topps cards I still don’t feel like they are different enough to warrant trying to build a whole team run. They do however always have a spot in my binder and Kevin Mitchell with his awful airbrushing is a great addition.

The 1995 Sportflix is new to me as well. As is the JR Phillips Pinnacle artist’s proof. I didn’t have Scott Erickson’s 98 Collectors Choice nor either of the Jason Castro stickers. The Will Clark Leather and Lumber card is a complete trainwreck with half the card dedicated to the Giants logo in a spot asking for an autograph or something. The Willie McCovey Diamond Kings meanwhile is surprisingly nice and the Clearly Donruss Camilo Doval is one the kind of thing I almost never have in the binder.

There was a big big stack of 2024 cards. Lots of Flagship which I don’t need to discuss. These are my first base Chrome cards though true to form they are still outnumbered by the parallel Chrome cards. The big stack of Allen and Ginter is almost all new to me. Very nice to add few minis since they’re the part of Ginter I like best.There’s something up with the Kyle Harrison and how it’s pretty much missing its black ink. There’s no blackless parallel listed on TCDB so this may be a printing screwup.

A bunch of Archives—another set where my only cards to-date have been parallels—is very welcome even though I hate the way Topps butchered the 1970 design. Besides the weird green text for the Giants the name text is completely incorrect. This confuses me since the same font is used for the names on the 1994 design. And the Hoerner Stadium Club Chrome as well as the stack of Bowman Chromes are all new to me as well.

Some more 2024 cards. A bunch of Panini Donruss/Optic in all its weird AI trained on classic Donruss glory. Crusade is a set that continues to confuse me. The USA card is my first Malcolm Moore card. I’d actually missed that he was in Bowman this year. Love the Chrome Olympians set. And I had to figure out what those Panini Stickers were but they appear to have been distributed in Happy Meals for a couple of months in 2024. Nice to have another Ledecky and kind of amazing to see Athing Mu and realize how much she’s disappeared in only a year.

And finally the 2025 cards. Another big stack of flagship which doesn’t need to be talked about although I will mention that Marc very generously included a few Acuña cards for my eldest who remains an Acuña fanboy. The Sparkle Wade is nice as is the Chapman insert.* The Chrome, Ginter, and Archives are all my first cards from those sets.

The Ginters are the only giants cards in the Sweet Victories insert set so I still don’t have any base cards from that set. The Archives are pretty well made this year. Hoerner’s photo isn’t quite 1964 correct and the fonts on 1996 and 2004 are a bit compressed but there’s nothing egregious in part because Verlander sort of needs a compressed font.

A bunch of Panini stuff including a big stack of Donruss and its parallels as well as a smaller stack of Crusade. I think I’d like Crusade more if the heraldric backgrounds had anything to do with the team. Still I kind of like that Sasaki card. These are also my first base 2025 Bowmans. It’s very telling about the state of things that so many of the 2025s are sets I don’t have any cards from.

*He has two cards in this insert set. Marc included both but only one was new to me.

I also need to include a pair of customs that Marc sent me. The first is one of his series of customs of guys from the same family who played in the majors. This has been a fun one to see develop and In suspect that this is the first of many cards that he’ll be sending me since there a lot of Stanford guys on both his checklist and his potential checklist.*

*Amaro, Boone, Camilli, Mayberry, Quantrill, Sprague…

The other is actually one of my own. I asked Marc to print this for me ages ago. John Racanelli has been making literal series customs for years. He won an award for SABR for a series of posts he wrote for the baseball card blog in 2023 and I figured it would be fun to reward him with his own literal card. He got his copies I think ion the begining of 2025 but Marc sent me a stack as well.

Thanks guys and I hope your holidays were good too!

15 years!

I started writing this blog 15 years ago when I was working in tech support and manning the phones over Christmas break as one of the only people in the office for the three days the company was officially closed (tech support never sleeps). This was always a very quiet day in the office and for whatever reason I decided to start blogging about photography and museums. While my post on the Oakland Museum is technically my first, I published a second that day featuring some photos.

Blogiversary posts aren’t a regular thing here. Celebrating every five years though feels like the correct amount of time. My post from five years ago is a good recap of my first decade of blogging and the transition from writing about art museums and photography to writing about baseball cards.* I don”t have much to add to this post since I think my blog has been mostly unchanged in that time.

*I’d actually forgotten that I did such a post but in my defense 2020 was a weird year and the subsequent 5 years have felt like 20.

Posts of my photography remain a regular thing. These are mostly monthly recaps but I’ve increasingly become the team photographer for all my kids’ sports teams and there are many posts documenting baseball, track, and cross country. After starting off as a staunchly “autofocus is for the weak” photographer who shot fully manual glass and only occasionally dabbled with fully automatic lenses, I’ve found myself shooting an autofocus telephoto zoom for the vast majority of my photos in the past couple years.

Card trading and maildays have severely tapered off due to the combination of it becoming nearly impossible to find packs and almost always financially irresponsible to purchase them. No one has any bycatch or tradebait any more. As that source of posts disappeared I started posting a roundup of cool pickups roughly every month. These are roughly chronological but are limited more by word count than anything else.

I’m also continuing to get and write about various sets and things in more depth when I can. At least 95% of these are pre-war but a few are not. But this area has continued to be the most fun things I’m doing in this hobby as it’s purely an exercise in being inspired by something cool and then doing a bit of research into the items.

It really feels though like the last five years have been the most stable of my blog’s life as my interests have been pretty consistent and I’ve sort of figured out my voice. The next five years look to be a lot of change. Kids are growing up and heading off to college soon. Baseball and baseball cards meanwhile are determined to alienate as many people as possible. No idea what the future holds I just know it’s likely to be very different.

Thanks to everyone for reading.

AAA Strip Maps

One of the things I liked most at the Petersen was the display of maps and the history of automobile clubs and gas stations publishing them for motorists. While I’m familiar with the gas station maps* there were a bunch of strip maps published by AAA—back when it was just the Automobile Club of Southern California—in the 1910s which I’d never seen before.

*I have a 1936 Conoco map of California up on our hallway wall. It’s a fascinating way of viewing the state when you’ve grown up only knowing Interstate highways.

These were broader in scope than the local sectional pages in the Thomas Guide. Each strip map was essentially covering one specific driving route across the state. I made a note to look them up once Fall hit and see if any looked interesting. And as per usual I ended up grabbing a few of them, in this case more than enough for a standalone post rather than lumping them into the general cool stuff post.

My main point of interest was to look for maps that covered drives or areas which I was familiar with. This first pair come from different years but cover much of drive we take to Packer Lake from the Bay Area.

The drive out of Sacramento into the mountains is definitely the more interesting stretch as well so it’s really interesting to see how it’s changed. This first map covers Sacramento to Auburn at which point we bounce off onto the road (now Highway 49) to Grass Valley

The second map from Marysville to Mohawk allows us to pick up the ride at Grass Valley at the bottom of the map and work our way through Nevada City and North San Juan before hitting the main route on this map in Camptonville.

It’s really interesting to me to see how there are no street names or numbering on these. Lots of mileage markers and information about gas, water, lodging, ranger stations, etc. There are also lots of markers about elevation and elevation changes which suggests that driving back then was much much more aware of the terrain and used it for routefinding.

The Map from Sacramento to Auburn also has all kinds of wonderful terrain detail which makes it extremely obvious how when you hit Rocklin you’re all of sudden climbing the Sierra Nevadas.

It was nice to get a map showing San Francisco and the East Bay since I’m super familiar with this area from my childhood. Really cool to see it not only pre-interstate but pre-bridges with ferries taking off from the Ferry Building.

This map has a few street names—Market Street in San Francisco, 12th and 14th in Oakland, and Foothill Blvd heading form Oakland to Hayward—but also has a ton of labeled train lines which are also a very interesting view on navigating the area. It’s very clear that the routefinding for urban locations is very different from rural ones.

This pair covers the trip from San Francisco to Santa Cruz along what’s now known as Highway 1. Not a lot of services along this route—just Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, and Davenport—and it’s really interesting to locate the beaches based on their creeks rather than having them be named.

I was interested to note that there is no road marked to Menlo Park from San Gregorio and only when seeing the Crystal Springs lakes did I realize that Crystal Springs Dam was built in 1889 because I was not expecting to see the reservoirs.* San Francisco’s development is also worth noting as much of the Sunset does not appear to have a city grid, the Presidio is still military, and Hunter’s Point/Point Avisadero has not yet been developed into the shipyard.

*Non-Californians should note that the axis of San Andreas Lake and Crystal Springs Lake is the line of the San Andreas Fault.

Also, our trip to the coast last summer took us from Half Moon Bay (we ate in Princeton) up to just south of San Pedro Point where the Devils Slide Trail is. I’ve blogged about the Pigeon Point Lighthouse before on here as well.

I was unable to find a map of the South Bay but I did find a couple showing routes to Salinas. The one from San José covers a lot of the drive south on 101 that we take on the way to the Valley, Los Angeles, Carmel, or Monterey. Interesting to see that the recommended route to Salinas is the San Juan Grade, a road which still exists but is not at all the main route anymore.

What I enjoy most about this map are the various destinations that are called out depending on which route you choose to exit the map. Some like Lick Observatory and Mount Hamilton are familiar to me. Others like Madrone Springs* required me to do some googling.

*A resort up until the 1940s in what is now Henry Coe State Park. The springs are apparently dry now.

This is the only one of the maps with a copyright date but I have no idea if the undated ones are older or younger than this 1918 map.

The other map from Santa Cruz has a pair of fantastic inset maps showing the downtowns of Santa Cruz and Salinas. It also has fun labels for the destinations leaving the map where you can head to San Juan (Bautista) and Gilroy via Chittenden Pass or Morgan Hill via Mt. Madonna.

Will I get more of these? Perhaps. A South Bay one would definitely be nice and I wouldn’t mind covering the San Francisco to Sacramento route. But these are fun enough for the time being.