I have complete sets along with thousands of duplicates of baseball,
football and basketball from years 1958 thru 1962 that I bought as a
kid. I was an avid set building collector. Over the years I took
care of them and stored them. In the late 80's with the card boom I
took them from storage and learned about grading and I graded them for
myself.
I've put off having any graded by PSA so far because of the expense
and hassle of doing so and figuring I'd wait until the dust settled
with grading and the card market in general. Besides, I have hundreds
of cards that I'm sure are NM minimum. This includes an equal ratio
of commons to stars because when I was collecting them as a kid I
treated them all the same.
If I can't have them all graded because of the cost, would it be
smarter to cherry pick the absolute best cards (legitimate "9"
candidates) even if they are commons than the 7's & 8's of stars? I
have many nice 62Topps baseball, 61 Fleer football and especially 61
Fleer basketball. This is because they were not popular (at least with
me) and were not played with or handled much... just put them in cigar
boxes.
I think I'd rather have the fun of selling them individually than as a
lump to some large dealer...and I guess Ebay is the way to do that.
But that leads back to the grading question. Any ideas?