A card shop find - a 1983 Topps set

During an out of town card shop trip , I was lurking in the junk wax / junk set corner, maybe looking for a junk wax box / junk era set to rip  - I guess I see myself as a hoarder or at the very least willing to rummage through a pile of crap to try and find 'something' to take home.

The last time I was at this card shop was in fall of 2017 and think I saw a 1995 Upper Deck Minors box for $15 last fall which was intriguing because regardless of how bad the content has aged - those mid 90s UD sets still look good.

However, there is probably lots of turnover - even if any particular box / set is just squirreled away somewhere else as opposed to someone actually buying it.

I saw some hand collated sets [junk wax era] on the counter closest to where all the junk boxes / junk sets are - this isn’t what I’m really looking for because the brown card boxes look ancient and taped shut, so who knows if there are just repacked garbage in there.

One of the store employees was explaining to an older collector that he just got those sets in and they did have the key cards - the older collector was looking for a run of old-school Topps sets.

I was lingering by, but the older collector was coming along looking for this and that - it felt like I kind of snatched the box with the 1983 Topps set [marked at $20] from just under his grasp.

Maybe the value has bottomed out, but old-school, pre junk wax era cards printed through the mid 1980s are still intriguing - it would be an impulse buy, but could I beat the price?

I really wasn’t about to mess with the set because who knows where it came from - even if the rookie cards of Ryne Sandberg [#83], Tony Gwynn [#482] and Wade Boggs [#498] would make the set seem like a no brainer purchase.

I have a PSA graded Sandberg and do prefer PSA graded rookies of Gwynn and Boggs - since there is some assurance someone looked at the cards to deem them authentic and assign a numerical grade.

For a price of a blaster, I could at least mimic the experience of going through the 35-year old cards like they came from unopened rips - maybe I could try to finish off my Topps team runs for 1983 with cards leftover for various, miscellaneous interests.

I actually took the time to put the set in plastic pages to see what a full set of 792 cards would look like in a book - during a few different times, I emptied out just about 90 plastic pages filled with assorted inserts and added the 1983 Topps cards.

To the naked eye the Sandberg, Gwynn and Boggs are presentable - maybe kind of examples I'd find in a more common showcase of cards at a card show or card shop.

The rest of the cards are probably in 'ex-mt' condition, with examples of cards - being off-center, miscut or otherwise having some sort of noticeable blemish.

I'll probably leave the misfit condition cards as fillers since I'm not a set guy - it's not really worth it to me to track down countless 1983 Topps so I can upgrade a random common here, a random star card here, etc.