What to do with an inherited card collection

Before anything else, leave them alone

The instinct is to tidy: wipe the dust off, sort them into piles, put the good ones somewhere safe. Every one of those is a small risk and none of them helps. Cards are judged on their surface, corners and edges, and handling is what damages all three.

• Do not put rubber bands around stacks. They cut into the edges and the marks do not come out.
• Do not re-sleeve, re-sort or re-box anything. Whatever order they are in is fine.
• Do not open sealed packs or boxes to see what is inside. Sealed is a category of its own, and opening it is not reversible.
• Do not take a card out of a hard plastic holder with a printed label on it. That is a grading company slab, and the grade lives with the holder.
• Do not throw away anything that came with them: wrappers, empty boxes, paper inserts, letters, receipts, programs and ticket stubs.

Get them out of the heat

This matters more here than it would somewhere else. A garage or an attic in South Florida spends half the year hot and humid, and cardboard responds to both: corners soften, surfaces stick together, paper warps. If the boxes are in a garage in Jupiter or an attic in Boca Raton, moving them into an air-conditioned room is the most useful thing you can do this week.

• An interior closet beats a garage, an attic or a storage unit.
• Keep them off a concrete floor, which holds moisture. A shelf or a table is enough.
• Leave them in the boxes they are in. If you do move them into a sealed plastic bin, make sure they are dry first, because a sealed bin keeps whatever humidity went in with it.

What is probably in there

Most inherited collections follow the same shape. The bulk of the cards were printed between the late 1980s and the mid 1990s, when the card companies were producing far more than collectors could ever absorb, and cards from those years are common today because they were common then. That is the honest starting point, and it is not a comment on the person who saved them.

It is also not the end of the story. The same boxes very often hold a few cards worth real money, and sometimes one thing worth more than everything else combined. The job is not to value four thousand cards. It is to find the few that carry the value.

The things worth pulling aside

You do not need to know anything about cards to do this. Every item below can be identified by looking at it, and putting them together in one box is enough to make the rest of the process quick.

Anything in a sealed plastic slab

A hard case with a printed label and a number on it is a graded card. A third party has already examined it. Keep it sealed.

Cards with a serial number printed on them

Something like 24/250 stamped on the front or back means the maker stated how many exist. Those are worth checking one at a time.

Autographs

Both kinds: cards signed in person, and cards the manufacturer produced with a signature and a certificate line printed on the back.

Cards with fabric or wood set into them

Memorabilia cards, usually a small swatch behind a window. Worth setting aside even though many of them are common.

Anything that looks older than 1980

Different paper, a smaller size, duller ink, often bent. Older cards were printed in far smaller numbers and most were thrown away, so age genuinely matters here in a way it does not for the 1990s.

Unopened packs, boxes and factory sets

Still in the wrapper or the shrink wrap. Leave them that way.

Everything that is not a card

Signed baseballs, programs, ticket stubs, photographs, letters, old equipment. These often outvalue the cards they were stored with, and they are the things most likely to be thrown out.

How to find out what it is worth

There are three honest routes, and which one fits depends on how much time you want to spend.

There is also a step before all three, and it is free. Some dealers, ourselves included, will look at photographs of what you have and tell you whether there is anything notable in there and whether it is worth going any further. Nothing is signed, nothing is owed, and nobody comes to the house. What comes back is an impression from a photograph rather than a researched figure - it is not a number to divide a collection by, or to repeat to anyone else - but it is usually enough to tell you which of the three below you actually need.

Look it up yourself

Take the cards you set aside and search each one, then filter the results to completed, sold listings rather than active ones. An asking price is not a sale. This is free and it is genuinely how the number gets worked out. It is also slow, which is the only argument against it.

Pay for a valuation

An itemized report of what is there, with condition and an estimated range, and you keep every card. People use one to work out what a collection is worth before deciding anything, without deciding it under pressure. It is written for whoever pays for it: anything sworn to a court or filed with a tax return needs an independent appraiser instead.

Ask for an offer

Free, and it commits you to nothing. A buyer goes through the collection with you, itemizes what is notable and prices the rest as a lot. You can decline and take it home.

If more than one person inherited it

This is the situation that goes wrong most often, and it goes wrong the same way every time: one person gets an offer, another person read something online, and the two numbers cannot both be right. Nobody is being unreasonable. They are working from different information.

One itemized valuation is the sane starting point, because it replaces two half-remembered numbers with one researched one. It is written for whoever pays for it, and a family that cannot agree needs an independent appraiser rather than a dealer opinion. It is also far easier to divide a collection fairly while it is still whole, so divide first and sell second.

What we would do with it

We are in Jupiter and we work across Palm Beach and Martin County, from Stuart down to Boca Raton. You send photos of the boxes as they sit, with no sorting and no cleaning, and we tell you what is there. If it is a fit we meet in a public place near you during the day, go through the cards together, and explain the reasoning behind any number we put on them. You can say no at the table and take everything home.

If the boxes are in one of these towns, its own page says where we would meet you there: Stuart, Jupiter, Palm Beach Gardens, West Palm Beach, Wellington, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and Boca Raton. Every other town we cover is on the service-area page.

We do not accept mail-ins, and we do not make offers on cards we have not seen. If there is nothing in the boxes worth an offer, we will tell you that instead of making one that wastes your afternoon.