July 1991 Baseball Card Price Guide Monthly

July 1991 Baseball Card Price Guide Monthly front cover.

Today we're featuring this old magazine, the July, 1991 issue of Baseball Card Price Guide Monthly.  The magazine comes with 5 replica cards inside, in the 1971 Topps style.  As you can see here, Barry Bonds is featured on the cover, with an inset image of the 1969 Topps Reggie Jackson rookie card. 

One of the stories mentioned on the front is that the Reggie Jackson rookie card was up to $450 in value; if I were to buy one today (graded), it's possible that I might pay that much now.  Of course, $450 in 1991 went further than it does today before 25+ years of inflation, and condition wasn't king the way it is now.  There's a huge difference in prices you might find for PSA 7 and PSA 9; I don't know which of those, or what else, the magazine's $450 refers to.  In any case, the Reggie Jackson rookie card is on my want list for eventual purchase, and I usually intend to get PSA 7.  If I do eventually get one, I will either wait some time before getting it, or maybe settle for lower condition.

Other stories on the front: Overpriced Cards You Should Avoid, and Make Money with Mid-80s Sets.  I didn't go in for cards as an investment, so these stories didn't impact me too much.  In hindsight, though, if you wanted to make money with those cards, you needed to do it fast!  I remember towards the end of my collecting days, the owner of one of my local shops telling me she thought the current cards were going to be worthless.  That might have been 1993 or 1994.  She was right of course; I told her that I enjoyed collecting from the 70s, and wasn't looking at any of the cards, especially the current ones, to make money.

Replica cards of Mark McGwire, Kevin Mitchell, and George Brett.

For some of the cards like these that came in magazines, I cut them out, but later I started to keep them intact in their magazines.  So these, in July 1991, are part of my intact collection.  While I guess putting modern players on vintage designs (and vice versa) is commonplace today, it was a novelty back then.  Seeing McGwire, Mitchell, and Brett grace the 1971 Topps design was pretty cool.

Card backs.

I've always liked the 1971 Topps card back, with a smaller picture instead of a cartoon as many older Topps card backs had.

Replica cards of Rafael Palmeiro and Robin Yount.

I liked Rafael Palmeiro at the time, but really only because his 1987 Topps card featured the "Future Stars" logo.  He was mainly with the Rangers while I was paying attention to baseball, and they were in the other league, they were far away, and they didn't make the playoffs.  So, I had limited exposure to them and to Palmeiro except through his cards.  I similarly didn't know much about Robin Yount, but I think I heard talk of him as a future Hall-of-Famer.  That of course raised the level of interest in his cards.

Card backs.

If you look closely, you can see that the card backs don't have statistics, but instead have card values.  What else would you expect from cards issued by a price guide magazine, especially in 1991?

A page of the price guide, featuring 1987 Classic and 1987 Donruss.

Like I said above, I didn't consider my cards an investment.  Of course it made me happy, though, if a price guide indicated that something in my collection was valuable.  That was the case with the 1987 Classic set shown here in the price guide.  $200 for the complete set!  And I owned it!  My parents gave me the "Green Classic" board game as a Christmas present the year it came out; I hadn't heard of it before that.  Rather than keep the game in pristine condition, I, perhaps foolishly at the time, played it with my friends as a board game.  You can see in the listing, the Bo Jackson card alone was supposedly worth $100.  Mine wasn't in perfect condition per se, as I played the game with it, but it was nice to see that it had some value.  Looking back, I'm glad to say that I played the game, so that I got some enjoyment out of it.  While the cards aren't in perfect shape, I checked them out recently, and they're not banged up too badly.

That's it for this old magazine.  Thanks for reading!  We've previously featured some other old magazines:

1. My First Beckett: September 1987, Andre Dawson Front Cover
2. November 1990 Baseball Card Price Guide Monthly (Michael Jordan Front Cover)
3. June 1988 Baseball Card Price Guide Monthly (Matt Nokes Front Cover)