Marbles Stars Of The Show This Weekend In New Philadelphia

 

The Plain Dealer

Fran Henry

February 05, 2008

 

 

Carl Fisher; Some of the clay
polymer marbles made by Aurora
artist Carl Fisher.

 

You can walk into the Buckeye Marble Show on Saturday for free, which is a very nice price, but you'll need $1,000 if you want to leave with a rare vintage purple-and-white horizontal swirled Navarre glass marble or $25 for a colorful contemporary marble created by Aurora artist Carl Fisher.

But if you're a kid, some of the show's 60 or so vendors will be happy to fill your pockets with common marbles for free.

That's the beauty of marble collecting, said show organizer Steve Smith, who has 80,000 in tubs and jars around his New Philadelphia home. "Even the common ones are nice to keep because they're pretty to look at."

The entire marble spectrum, from highly collectible to common, will be on view and for sale 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Holiday Inn in New Philadelphia, Exit 81 off I-77. It's billed as the country's largest marble show.

"There will be literally a million marbles in the hotel," said Smith, whose biggest sale was $3,800 for a clear glass marble with a painted dog inside. "Collectors will be looking at marble with jeweler's loupes like they're looking at diamonds."

Smith speculated that the show's popularity with vendors is related to its proximity to the original marble factories, including Akron's American Marble and Toy Manufacturing Co. It opened in 1884, the first factory to mass-produce marbles in the United States. It burnt down in 1904.

 

The only remaining marble factory in Ohio is JABO, Inc., located in Reno, but the vultures are circling. Four years ago, president Joanne Argabrite said, the company had 148 employees and 16 machines making 250,000 marbles a day. Today, the company operates two machines, has 16 employees and faces the possibility that it's produced its last collectors' marbles.

The reason: "China, good old China," Argabrite said. About six years ago, a Chinese manufacturer undercut JABO's Wal-Mart market by selling marbles at 29 cents a pound. JABO sold to Wal-Mart for 47 cents a pound. "That's what it costs to make them here because of EPA restrictions and wages," she said.

Most of the marbles were used by crafters, she said, "women who put them in vases for flower arrangements and such. Now we sell to the industrial market, for spray paint cans and a few loyal companies in the flower arrangement industry."

Fisher will be among a handful of contemporary marble artists at the show. While most of them work with glass, he creates his marbles out of polymer clay. He learned to make them two years ago to serve as "placekeepers" in his collection for marbles he either can't find or can't afford. Fellow collectors admired them, so he began selling them.

He thinks the market for marbles is growing. At the recent Medina Antique, he said, one in four or five vendors sold marbles, a rarity in the past. He credits boomers entering retirement, "thinking back to less stressful times."