Mace Coin & Card Mart

Scranton's oldest card counter, running on North Main since the 1950s — vintage baseball and football, sealed wax, coins, and bullion side by side.

Nearly seventy years in one trade is a rare thing in this hobby, and Mace Coin & Card Mart has it. The shop traces its founding to the late 1950s, which makes it not just the oldest card shop in Scranton but older than most of the cardboard it sells. It sits on North Main Avenue in the West Side Hyde Park neighborhood, directly across from the Wells Fargo branch, in a storefront that has never pretended to be anything other than what it is.

The business runs on two counters. One is cards — vintage and modern baseball, football, basketball and hockey, sealed hobby boxes, and the supplies to house all of it. The other is coins and bullion, with gold, silver and platinum bought and sold on the spot. A third, smaller corner carries militaria: swords, bayonets, service medals, uniforms. Collectors who've never wandered into a dual coin-and-card shop tend to find the mix disorienting for about ninety seconds and then extremely useful, particularly when liquidating a mixed estate.

Set expectations correctly and this is one of the best stops in Lackawanna County. Set them wrong and you'll be disappointed. There is no play space, no Friday night tournament, no wall of Magic singles — a Scranton card shop of this vintage is a browse-and-buy counter, and the appeal is the depth of what's behind the glass and the person standing on the other side of it. The shop buys collections outright and has been the default destination for NEPA collectors unloading inherited boxes for decades.

Hours are the one genuine obstacle. Mace opens at 11am and closes at 4pm Monday through Friday, 11am to 3pm on Saturday, and stays shut on Sunday — a five-hour weekday window that rules out anyone working a standard shift. Plan a long lunch or a Saturday morning. The entrance is wheelchair accessible with accessible parking near the door, which is not universal among century-old Main Avenue storefronts.

Word of mouth here spans generations, and the reviews read that way: customers describing three and four decades of continuous business with the same counter. If you collect vintage sports cards in Scranton and you haven't been, you're the one missing out on the local institution.