Wednesday, April 21, 2021

The Oakland A's 25-Year Anniversary Set

We have this longtime store in San Francisco called The Magazine. It's the sort of place you'd likely only find in a large, somewhat literate city - one that sells no books, but only back issues of magazines like The New Yorker, Popular Mechanics, Sports Illustrated and so on. It has a huge collection of paper ephemera - maps, catalogs, convention guidebooks, pamphlets - as well as a gay (and some straight) vintage erotica section near the back. I can't believe it's still alive, but it's the sort of place worth celebrating.

I dropped in last week for the first time since Covid and looked around the vintage sports magazines. In the stacks I was able to procure a 1992 copy of "Athletics Magazine", which looks to be a monthly Oakland A's-funded magazine about the team, as many teams have. This $1 back issue also had tear-out baseball cards in it - nice-looking ones - so naturally, I added it to my stack of cheap paper ephemera. 

The cards immortalize what were then the 16 greatest all-time Oakland A's, starting from the time they moved from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968. Clearly, I only got cards #9-#16 of the 16 cards, and the other eight were in a previous issue. I'll try and find that at The Magazine next time. In the meantime, we have a few good ones here, including current Chicago White Sox manager Tony LaRussa (!). 







6 comments:

  1. Nice. What do the backs look like?

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  2. These are great! I like the close up action shot look on these.

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  3. That place sounds awesome. We barely have anything like that in NY anymore. The prices for the magazines on the website seem quite high but sounds like they have better cheaper stuff in store if you got that magazine for $1.

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  4. There used to be a place in Portland called Periodicals Paradise that, aside from the erotic fiction, was pretty much the same. It really was a great store in it's prime, but by about 2000-ish really started to decline, and has now been gone for at least a handful of years.

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  5. Awesome find, never heard of that place. It's only 2 blocks from my favorite Wisconsin Badger dive bar, Aces!

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