Last week, a single trading card of Dallas Mavericks young star Cooper Flagg sold for just over $8 million dollars. This is not Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth, but a young (though much-lauded) player yet to even make the NBA playoffs. But the juice was in the rarity: it is a one-of-one card, with a patch from the uniform Flagg wore during his first professional game. 

I’ve long wondered if publishers could do more to stoke interest in collecting books, which currently is the domain of aftermarket dealers. The Flagg card is a collaboration between the league (how else are you going to get the rights), the player (how else are you going to get the patch), and the card maker. 

Sports cards have a much longer history and a larger base of collectors, but could there be something here for the book industry? What if rather than John Green signing so many books that it loses meaning, there was some special 1:1 thing (or 1 of 10, but you get the idea) that you had a shot at if you bought a physical copy of the book? Maybe each comes with a bookplate or something, but there is also a Wonka-life element as well: maybe a section of the manuscript or a handwritten letter from Green’s editor or something from when they were working on his first novel. 

Maybe some folks would try to buy multiple copies for a shot at it, but what a special object really does is collect attention. You and I are never going to own that Flagg card or anything like it, but for some of you, you probably didn’t know who Cooper Flagg was until just now. See how that works? —JO