1991 Legends Sports Memorabilia

 

Another trend in the boom years with sports card magazines with cards inserted, usually on a cardboard sheet.  Krause Publications started the practice in the mid-1980's with reprint cards in Baseball Cards Magazine. (I'll have to do another article on Baseball Cards Magazine). By the late-80's, insert sheets appeared in BCM.  They mimicked old Topps and Bowman sets but featured modern players.  

In 1991 a full-color, high gloss magazine appeared in card shops,  Legends Sports Memorabilia.  Legends was on very high quality paper and looked a lot like "The Robb Report," a magazine geared towards high-end cars, vacations and boats. The articles were on sports card investing.  There were a lot of carefully researched articles on pricing trends- if you followed their advice you would buy cards like 1986 Fleer Canseco rookies for $50 and 1985 Eric Davis rookies for $25.  Oof.  That's just how people thought back then.  Cards were considered a sure path to wealth.

The real draw for Legends was their insert sheet of nine cards, featuring superstars from all sports who were mentioned in the magazine.  In that era, fans were superstar crazy.  Manufacturers didn't have all the brands there are now, so anything with a hot player's picture would sell.  Legends cards were high quality, printed on thick stock with vivid colors and sometimes gold foil accents. They were better looking than any of the major issues in my opinion, even the premium Upper Deck and Leaf sets.  Many dealers bought hundreds of these magazines and cut them up into singles, which sold briskly for $2-5 each at shows.  Not a bad profit from a magazine that sold at newsstands for $5. 

Almost immediately, several imitators released their versions.  I remember "Ballstreet Journal," "Pocket Pages." "Sports Card News" and "Tuff Stuff."  Most weren't as nice as Legends, but every piece of cardboard with a picture of a superstar athlete sold back then.  The magazines article's were mostly geared towards investors, though "Tuff Stuff" and "Sports Card News" had articles of interest to casual collectors.  For many of these magazines, the articles were just filler around the cards.

The Achille's Heel for these cards was that they weren't licensed.  The publishers hoped to evade costly licensing requirements by packaging them with magazines as "editorial content" protected under the First Amendment and Fair Use.  For a couple years, it worked, though it is pretty clear that the product being sold were the cards, not the magazine.  

Eventually the licensors executed legal action and put many of these magazines out of business.  "Tuff Stuff" persisted for many years afterwards, but without the cards.  "Tuff Stuff" actually had decent content, unlike many of the others. 

There is one magazine that still publishes 30 years later and still has cards inserted in the magazine.  "Sports Illustrated for Kids" inserted sheets of exclusive cards in the magazine starting in 1990.  I'm not sure why they still publish cards, however SI for Kids has legitimate content and isn't just a vehicle to sell unlicensed cards. 

Most of these magazine insert cards sell for $1-3, though some of the "SI for Kids" cards sell more,  such as their first Tiger Woods card.