bumblebee

These folks show their marble finds from 50+ years of digging old privies: https://www.antique-bottles.net/threads/50-years-of-privy-digging.691383/#post-724003

Those are neat! Patterns resemble vintage rubber balls but look made of sandstone.

Try going to https://images.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl Then search for marbles window and see what shows up. I see some very neat ones. What would be really neat is to find a double-pane window wide enough to drop clearies into.

Nice handsome fellow! I've never found that color combo in the wild (not that I find many Pelts anyway!).

This was my best in recent memory. It was from a jar with mostly vintage common damaged mibs (including a peewee lutz) but then this shockingly mint brick. I think I paid $20. Took me a few minutes to talk myself out of believing this was contemporary. FullSizeRender.MOV

I knew somebody who had an amazing Master shooter with tons of colors. I swear it looked mint in hand but under a loupe it had been polished. Never occurred to me to check all my mint marbles but somebody did a very good job. There was very interesting pattern on the whole surface of the marble but too subtle for the naked eye.

I've never heard of a Czech circus marble. I have heard of a German Circus Marble. This marble has a neat pattern and construction. And don't forget those Bulgarian "carnival" marbles.

This way he just tells people to search cedarman7 and his listings come up too.

Yeah I never offer returns on large lots. Would be a nightmare with a dishonest buyer.

Weird that it's happening from multiple accounts. Do you have any reason to believe there is an old bad blood buyer trying to make your life hard? The company I work for has a person who has consistently ordered a large purchase once a year and then cancels the order saying they cannot afford it. This has happened for six years straight.

From what I remember playing marbles, the thrill was based in the scarcity of good marbles and the fair chance to win or lose them. There was some sort of important lesson in loving a small beautiful thing that you won while at the same time knowing you could lose it some day. Perhaps knowing that you could win it back, or even win a better one the next day, made letting go of it that much easier. There was also that mystery of the older marbles that some kids had. They had better colors and patterns, but usually scars. They were like stories and characters from the past who were playing among us.

I ran a few Library of Congress black and white photos through this amazing tool with some great results: https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/colorizer

You're welcome. It's a great book with tons of detail but it might be out of print.

"Colonial Period and Early 19th Century Children's Toy Marbles" by Richard Gartley and Jeff Carskadden (1998)

I've been on an agate kick lately which finally landed me a 7/8"+ faceted blue one. That's the second one I've ever found in 3/4" and above. From my experience, the green ones are even harder to find but of course all it takes is one nice score to change those stats. On that note, there are some very nice shooter sized machine-ground blue and green bullseye agates that I believe are from Brazil and are definitely older. I've always wondered whether German immigrants to Brazil brought their dyeing techniques and quality control to produce those. There was a big surge of German emigration to Brazil in 1920-1929 of 75k people, almost four times the number the decade before and after.

Gorgeous. I remember somebody posting Roman glass "marbles" long ago.

Dibble gets dibs! That's a really neat piece of history. @Bob Wuehrmann, thanks for sharing! Considering the amount of coverage, it reminds me just how big of a deal marbles was culturally in America for so long.

I fantasize about amazing scores. One involves finding a 50-gallon drum filled with marbles at an old picker's homestead. The other is discovering an entire railroad car filled with Akro marbles. My mind has worked out my strategy how I will sort through these marbles and also how to sell many without over-saturating the market. Of course my mind insists these marbles aren't Chinese checkers or clearies.

I've always wondered whether the Tiger Eye ones were faceted, assuming the Germans did make them. Here's the closest I can get to photographing the facets on the quartz one.

Bought an awesome lot of agates that included two mineral spheres. The big clear sphere was clearly machine ground, so I assumed the pinkish smaller one was too. Then today I looked at it under the loupe and was shocked to find tons of facets just like the real agates. I don't have a macro lens right now so you'll have to trust me. Lesson learned: always put a loupe on those mineral spheres as apparently those crafty Germans did make some non-agate ones.

Very old lot, maybe somebody's grandparent brought them over from Europe.

Are you trying to overturn decades of marble collecting folklore with your new-fangled scientific experiments? 😋

I recall there was a thread on this ages ago that even had lashes on some Akro glassware. It had me thinking that I can't recall seeing a lot of photos of non-corkscrew Akros with lashes.

They're BAAAAACK!

May she rest in peace. Sounds like a great lady. Would have been a great trip to visit a lively lady with a passion for marbles in old Amsterdam!