bumblebee

Fun article that mentions several classic marble types as well as their prices.

Welcome and thanks for taking up the oars to keep this old ship sailing.

This is great old and modern history combined.

There was a recent thread on FB where a person showed several that were fairly beat up, which he said he won at a carnival in Germany in 1984. If they were indeed being given as carnival prizes, presumably in the thousands in Western European countries since the early 1980s, why didn't any collectors have them until the sudden eBay surge? Surely they would have been found in shops or garage sales in the decades since 1984 and then posted on various forums like this one because of how curious they are? I also notice many images posted on this thread are gone forever, so hopefully somebody stashed them.

When I told him I collected antique marbles, he laughed because he never thought of his work as containing marbles.😛

With two recent donations of $100 each from two members, we now have $241 applied toward advanced hosting fees, so about nine months of hosting! It will be seven years next month since @LouisCamp handed me the reigns to the site. To give you an idea how old this forum is, Louis's account was created in June of 2005. I couldn't have kept it going these seven years without the financial support and our moderators. Discussion forums are rare these days, and this forum in particular is priceless in its wealth of information about this great hobby. I hope it will always be around even after I have to pass it on to some some younger collector who is also a tech geek. 😎

These old styles look good grouped together in an antique bowl or crock. One of the joys of old marbles is being able to handle them and hear them click together, or even play with them, so I personally wouldn't glue them to anything. As Steph said, these aren't particular valuable in the raw but given the sentimental and real historical association of them with your people and that property, they're pretty invaluable.

What web browser are you using? I've seen this happen in FireFox.

Mine all have dents and as-mades on them, unlike all my other Vacor marbles, so clearly something was different in the production of Atmospheres. I just assume hand-gathered and machine rounded.

Thanks. I was about to agree with you but I posted them on the Alley FaceBook group and Chuck S. said they're CAC. Hopefully more members will chime in with their vote. 😀

5/8". They feel CAC to me but I have seen Alley chocolate brown with green before (woodland camo, or something). Also all of my CAC swirls of this type have a darker, more vivid red.

Here's two:

Oxblood shooters are sweet. There's a lot more deep pockets in this hobby these days so I imagine it will go way beyond show prices.

Is it very light like a clay marble or is it heavy and rugged? If light I assume it's just a China marble that has worn down possibly from water damage which the painted parts would have resisted.

I do see stuff about Akro Agate donating marbles to tourneys for sure. Like 1933 in Illinois: Edit: another from 1929

Another good one this time from 1925.

Here's another that may be syndicated/rewritten from another article, but also features more tournament info.

I didn't have time to describe these in detail, but they contain some good descriptions of shooting techniques and putting English on a shot.

Are the exotics characteristically out of round like so many CACs?

The American Flint was the "Official Magazine of the American Flint Glass Workers Union of North America". In the 800+ page compilation I found on Google Books, this was the only article about marble making. 1927-05--American Flint - William J. Miller's Semi-Automatic Marble Machine.pdf

His horse's name is Friday?

Try it now. I doubled it from 75 to 150 for members and 300 for supporting members.

Here's a lot of these that sold March 2025 for $55 on a FB group. For the nicer ones I would pay $20 each for sure.

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.