bumblebee

7 minutes ago, schmoozer said:

How about requiring sellers/buyers to have 6 months as a member and 100 posts? Most con artists won’t probably make the effort to qualify?

We can restrict it by post count. It would stop newbies from signing up to sell great grandpa's collection, but maybe that's the wisest compromise.

@Steph, what do you think? Restrict posting by users who have more than 50 posts? 100?

So something like:

Buy/Sell Forum (long-time users only)

On 4/28/2021 at 11:44 PM, Steph said:

We had a buy/sell/trade forum but it wasn't being used so we got rid of it.  A couple of people who were liquidating their whole collections posted them in this general chat area.  But if there is interest in renewing the trade forum .... 

Jason?  @bumblebee  What are your thoughts?

@Steph, I am not opposed to reviving sales here, but I am hesitant because I do see a number of sales go bad on the FaceBook marbles groups.

What happens is the sellers want people to use PayPal "friends and family" to avoid fees, but sometimes a bad apple never ships the marbles, leaving the buyer straight out of luck because they sent payment as "friends and family" rather than "goods and services". Goods and services allows claims to be made against sellers. Of course, fees are the whole reason many folk stopped using eBay, so it's a Catch-22.

So perhaps large BUYER BEWARE sticky on a new buy/sell forum?

Rare seasonal run of Berry Pink "blues"!

Being a digital hoarder pays off sometimes. I am glad I downloaded a copy of the site and can provide it to the community.

Very nice! I had only a couple of scores like that in Southern California in ten years, and they weren't that many mibs.

Did anyone share the @mon thread from 2015 of tweeners? I suppose they are not true oddities, but they are savory rarities!

Vitros are my happiest marbles!

This hobby attracts many kind souls. The people in it have enriched my life immensely since I picked up marble collecting ~15 years ago. Healthy adults should always have at least one hobby that brings them joy.

So my wish for you is that we can bury the bad from 2020, remember the good, and enjoy a spring of happiness and new joys in 2021.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

If I were Santa, I'd put these new marbles in your stocking tonight:

Thanks, team! Forums like this are a last refuge for sharing "sticky" history that actually stays.

The FaceBook groups are quick and fun, but everything rolls off your front page into oblivion.

That's one reason why this old forum is so invaluable, all the work and detail and collaboration by its members to record and share our hobby's history.

I stumbled on this article from 1936 and press photo from 1933 that revealed Harold Lloyd was a serious marble player in his youth who became a serious collector as an adult. It is not every day you hear of a serious marble collector in 1933, especially a famous one.

The press photo reads as follows, and I assume the 'cat's eyes' were tiger eyes:

Quote

Hollywood has a new hobby, the collecting of agates. Harold Lloyd and his 3-year-old son, 'Bud' Harold jr., are shown with a collection of cat's eyes, bull's eyes, greenies, etc., assembled from all over the world. There are 200 rare specimens in the collection, some valued as high as $10.

I was very curious to find better photos of Harold's impressive-sounding agate collection, so I reached out to his agency in the off chance that somebody still had his collection. After a few weeks, I got a reply. Not the one I had hoped for entirely, but I was delighted and thankful for their efforts. Harold's granddaughter was the one who provided the status of his marbles, according to the rep:

Quote

I was able to find out from Harold's granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, that the marbles were given away as gifts years ago. They were gifted to Suzanne's cousin Cynthia Davis—also Harold's niece—and her husband Christopher Mitchum. So unfortunately we don't have access to them for photos anymore. Sorry for the disappointing news. However Suzanne and I would like to thank you and the marble collecting community for being so interested in Harold's collection and for bringing this fascinating question to us!

Sweet marble. It looks terrific complementing those flames. Never held one like that in hand.

Here's two Akro Royals with heavy AV and a middle one without AV. I have also seen someone with a green one with black AV.

Here's an unusual cork and matching patch with a scattering of AV

This is all I have so far, the biggest being about 7/8".

Compared to the carnelian and "onyx" black banded agates, blue and green are hard to find, with green being the hardest to find in my experience. Books mention yellow being even rarer, but I have never seen a yellow one. I doubt they would hold much eye appeal with the low contrast of yellow on white bands.

The Germans knew how to dye them red in the 18th century, but the blue dye didn't start until 1845, then green in 1855 according to "Colonial Period and Early 19th-Century Children's Toy Marbles".

Possible other reasons why they may be so scarce:

• Perhaps these were more costly to dye or more difficult to dye, and therefore fewer were made. I do notice they differ much more in color variation than red or black, so that inconsistency may have proven expensive or undesirable in other agate products that were being mass produced in the grinding mills.
• Perhaps these colors were not as popular to buyers as banded red or black.
• Perhaps their original owners loved them so much that most are still squirreled away in sock drawers and closets. This may account for a bit of the scarcity, but I have seen a couple of original agate boxes and do notice the blue or green ones are fewer in number to the carnelians or onyx ones.

Whatever the case, I want more!

1 minute ago, cheese said:

Thank you! All is well again.

👍

22 hours ago, Steph said:

What feature are you referring to?  I'm not sure how you managed to duplicate the glitch, Jason.  

Who is adding the img and /img tags to your address? Are those tags connected with the malfunction?

This forum used to recognize the BBcode for inserting images as discussed in this thread with the img tag encased in brackets, but the recent major update disabled that. Now it works again just like so (I'm copying cheese's original post example):

Well I was right: it was disabled in the update, but there is still an option to enable it, so I checked that.

They did warn that it may go away in future versions though.

I will ask support why. There was a major update in the last month that may have disabled this feature.

[img]https://i.ibb.co/BCY9hT0/DSC06301.jpg[/img]

Wow that first pinkish one is amazing. Always a rare color but I doubt I have even half that much of that color in all my Masters. Nice!

My aggies are still among my most prized marbles. I spend more time looking at them than my glass marbles. I think part of that is because I can handle them and not worry about chipping them.

Some real killers in there!

With marble history there is so much more to find out what we don't know about.

Very nice. A couple in there I've never found in any condition.

Nice juicy pelts! Imagine the thrill back in the day having access to brand new boxes of these mint beauties.

Here's a couple of articles.

From 1925 Los Angeles Times:

And from 1924 Los Angeles Times:

2 hours ago, Steph said:

Ha!  Love it.  


I _think_ there might also have been a stone version called snot agate.  I can't currently point you to where I got that idea, but somewhere loosely in my mind is a memory of seeing a newspaper article  from no later than 1905 which referenced snot agates. 

But of course I could be completely making that up!  

I'd trust your memory over mine but some searching at newspapers.com reveals the earliest instance of "snot agate" is 1914 where they do not describe it at all.

A 1921 article from Kansas, however,  mentions a "cloudy" being worth three "chinese" and then mentions a "brandy" being equal to "two glassies" thus perhaps suggesting a cloudy is not glass. I mention that because a couple of weeks later somebody wrote in and said "The 'cloudies' mentioned were perhaps the kind that went by the polite name of 'snot agates' with us." Whether he is right about a cloudy being nicknamed a snot agate, the fact is he is talking in 1921 about the marbles of his youth, so we may safely say that he was speaking of at least 10 or 15 years earlier.

Later articles such as one from 1952 mentions commies, crockeries, glassies, snot agates, pure agates, flinties. A 1956 article mentions snotties as a "cloudy transparent type" that was a class below the real bullseye agates.

A 1964 article about what boys did in 1912 says ""snot agate glass taws were five cents and real agates were 25 cents.""

Then this delightful article from 1937: