As readers might suspect, a number of our editorial staffers have been charged recently with creating auction descriptions for the Collect.com Auction Catalog, our first company venture into a sports memorabilia auction that is slated to close in late June.

It’s an all-hands-on-deck sort of thing, so being an old sailor I am familiar with the concept. I have been writing descriptions for a host of card lots, and it’s provided a whole new appreciation for the monumental challenges that confront auction houses as they scramble to produce their catalogs.

Finding new and interesting ways to describe an auction lot of baseball cards, for example, has to yield to the more fundamental burden of accurately describing the items in the lot so that bidders can have as clear a picture as possible about their potential bids.

And I gotta admit, it’s kind of fun as a change of pace, at least in small does, especially when you’re able to look at cool stuff that you don’t see every day. For me, that would involve a lot of the hockey and basketball cards that are included, since I haven’t collected either and didn’t do too much with those sports in the giddy days years ago when I was traveling around the East Coast and Midwest and pretending to be a competent card dealer.

I also didn’t do too much with unopened material, not out of choice but because I didn’t have too many opportunities. But I really love the whole concept, which is why it was neat to write up descriptions for a number of 1968-70 Topps Baseball unopened cello packs.

I always lusted over unopened material, mostly because I never understood how people managed to leave them that way. As I noted in the writeup, these things could have had lesser men gnawing on those impregnable GAI holders.