Keep it under your hat, but there are actually times when I get to write up an auction lot where it’s so much fun handling the lot that I would have happily provided the description gratis. That’s not the kind of admission you want to let get too widely disseminated, say, to upper management and the like, but I’m pretty sure they’re too busy counting beans to read my blog. Making a crack like that is a pretty effective way of testing my hypothesis.

Anyway, such was the case with Lot No. 148 in the upcoming Collect.com Auction, as nice an array of Near-Mint to Mint 1960 Topps Baseball cards as I have seen in, oh, I don’t know, let’s say about 17 years, 11 months and five days. Not that anybody is keeping track.

I’ll tell the story of the best pile of cards I ever let get away from me at a card show in a later blog, but suffice it to say that this lot reminded me of that pile in a big way.

 The auction (www.collect.com/auctions) goes live on July 26. Once it does, check out this lot of super high-grade 1960 Topps cards that includes a handful of Hall of Famers and 21 glorious high numbers. Here’s how I described Lot No. 148 for the catalog (in part):

I’ll bet you a shiny new quarter that you’ve never seen a nicer grouping of 222 different 1960 Topps Baseball cards than this. I know I haven’t. Near-Mint to Mint and centering so uniformly nice that I am all done talking about centering. Twenty-one high numbers absolutely as good as the 201 brethren who preceded them. Across the lot, with the greatest number of cards from the first and second series, we have brilliant white borders, blazing colors, trouble-free surfaces front and back, stunning white backs and elegant grays. In short, untouched, marvelous cards, each and every one of them suitable for third-party grading and entombing, if you like that sort of thing. I am simultaneously running out of breath and things to say, which sounds like serendipity, but I want to emphasize how cool this lot is.

I know I get a little carried away, but I wanted to convey something about a lot that because of its unusual configuration – you wonder how this group came together, this eclectic assortment of a couple HOFers, some nice specials and a bunch of cool minor stars – doesn’t neatly fit into typical categorization. Ultimately, it’s the condition of these cards that must carry the day, and my point here is that the condition is so spectacular that it should handle that challenge nicely.

One more little dab from the catalog:

My guess is that even for collectors who already have a Nr-Mt 1960 Topps set, this lot is worth a wager because these are likely upgrades over the status quo. And just think, I haven’t seen the status quo.

And then I added something about letting the bidding begin, and the rest of you duck and cover. That’s secret boomer code: presumably anybody old enough to have opened a pack of 1960 Topps cards in 1960 would know what it means.