bumblebee

I think about those guys who ran the machinery to produce millions of these marbles shaking their heads imagining us battling over names and identifications and miscellaneous petty disputes. Well, we are human I suppose.

@KateSo, I think maybe you meant the message you received on eBay was rude? This forum is one of the few places on the Internet where you can get honest opinions from people who have handled and scrutinized tens of thousands of marbles for years, sometimes decades. What others have said so far, which I agree with, is that your marble is a machine made glass marble with surface wear and damage often called flea-bites or perhaps flakes. The sparkles you see are likely from hit marks which create tiny areas of cracked subsurface glass that sparkle the light. Your shared image about agates is referring to agate marbles, which are mineral spheres, and in that context the old German-made hand-faceted agates are covered in tiny flat surface marks called facets where the grinder pushed the mineral sphere against a large rotating sandstone wheel in order to shape the rough-cut marble into a finer sphere. These facets will indeed reflect light but I would describe those reflections are erratic "wobble" reflections when the marble is turned in bright light, rather than single-point sparkles. Agate marbles can not contain aventurine because aventurine is a special type of glass. Aventurine glass is uncommon in machine made marbles. I once bought 50lbs (about 4000) of vintage marbles and found only four that contained aventurine. In my collecting experience most aventurine is green, but sometimes black, and rarely blue. Other collectors may have encountered a different order or additional colors. Aventurine is usually, but not always, dense with tiny shimmer points...almost looks like those NASA photos of deep space, and difficult to photograph. If you're new to selling marbles, usually the best course of action is to let the photos speak for themselves rather than hazard a guess. Believe me, if your photos are clear and show enough angles, the serious collectors are going to spot the rare or desirable marbles right away. That doesn't mean you cannot learn to identify certain common types that are easily identified, such as Akro Agate Corkscrews or Peltier Rainbos, but there's still always a risk of misidentification. The archived site JoeMarbles is a good source for photos of certain makers and types. Also, with eBay fees and shipping so high, it's usually in the seller's best interest to list small lots of marbles rather than individuals, unless you have a pristine hoard of rare marbles. You'll know right away if you have something special because bidders will battle. I hope that helps.

Nobody seems to know for sure but by 1934 or so, Germany had begun restricting export of many goods and then probably stopped entirely by 1939. I believe too that the value of agates had diminished to the point it wasn't worth the labor to produce them. As for machine ground, those were being made in Mexico and even California to fill the void, but I've always wondered when they started making them in Brazil because today that's still where the best ones seem to originate, and that's where German immigrants in the 19th century discovered rich agate to keep their industry going after the German sources were depleted.

Yay! My memory hasn't entirely failed me. I would enjoy seeing them again as I lost track.

Jessica, do I recall correctly you have some very nice cornflower blue Akros that not even Hulk Hogan could convince you to trade? 😀

Wow thank you Steph and Art! 🤩 Thanks to this and some other recent donations, I now have about $360 in unapplied hosting funds balance, so this will take care of those costs for quite a while.

I forget all the reasons it goes up but I believe it includes posting images and to the gallery, in addition to comments.

Wow, thanks Steph! I've seen this thing go for $250 on the FaceBook groups before.

For buy /sell, people can post external listings here: https://marbleconnection.com/topic/38521-share-public-marble-auctions-and-sales-listings-here/ For trade, I would be willing to re-add a forum that is Trade only, but also restricted by post count. Trades gone bad are heart breaking. I would rather only trusted, established users have access. That way we don't attract scammers who might have gotten kicked off the FaceBook buy/sell forums. Maybe that's what I should have done in the first place. What do you all think?

Exciting! I have never found a CAC Guinea in any condition out there in 15 years of active collecting.

Good to see agates getting some love. I don't have any yellow agates either. They aren't great looking in the examples I have seen. They lack pop and contrast, so I think they stopped bothering to dye them because the results were unsatisfactory compared to the banded agate colors in red, blue, green, black, etc. After yellow, gray with white bullseyes is my rarest color. Gray/white is the natural color of a lot of agate deposits. You can easily find solid gray agates without bullseyes, but I have only found one gray agate with white bullseyes that is faceted. I find more blue than green for some reason, though bullseyes of either color are very scarce in hand-faceted ones, and shooters even rarer. I read somewhere they struggled with consistent results with blue dyes, which reflects my blue agates. Many are very dark or have varying shades of blue in them. Then there are agates that are sort of chocolatey and creamy, orange with white, then black and white ones (often called onyx), then the famous carnelian red agates with white bullseyes. Below those are the cheaper grades lacking bullseyes or having very faint bullseyes, usually carnelian colors, but sometimes shades of gray. You can still buy some high quality dyed agates made today that look as good as the better vintage ones to the point you might think they are vintage but for the lack of facets. This seller on Etsy has the best ones I know about: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1515876781/banded-agate-sphere-blue-sagb

It seems the Score! thread has veered into deep mibology debate...maybe ya'll could start a new topic in the general forum to focus the energy there. 😎

He's being a rebel hanging out with the non-glass tough old guys. 😀

About 12 years ago my neighbor in California, who was not a collector, got a flea market lot similar to this size for $75 and went on to sell individually for about $5k, including a Blue Galaxy. Most were individually in bags so obviously belonged to a real collector but the sellers obviously didn't know, and neither did my neighbor until he started listing them and saw the bids flying.

This seller is obviously new to marbles. His batting average is very poor, but I sort of admire his tenacity and imagination.