bumblebee

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!

I'm with Schmoozer. I have too many of certain types (like Vitro Tiger Eyes) that I have no practical way of displaying (enjoying) so I want to thin those out and focus on displaying the favorites creatively. I'm also thinking of putting all my individually stored "odd ball" marbles into a single container that I can look at all the time. So many weird ones bunched together would be far more interesting to my eyes, though my instinct to not have mint marbles touching may need some coaxing.

Very sorry to hear this. I enjoyed many of his posts over the years.

Merry Christmas to you too. We had a dusting of snow this AM but as you can see, the sun is going to take it away. I won't complain about getting snow and sun on Christmas Eve!

Wow....all incredible marbles. I don't even know what the top one is, but I found myself making cave man noises over it. Hope to see more angles of them after Christmas. Clearly you are worthy of these nice marbles. Thank you for sharing the joy of extended Christmas marble mail with us!

Very nice assortment of Christmas colors. That reminds me, I still have a lot of shopping to do!

Goal keeper!

Wow nice Easter Egg. The case would look nice anywhere in the house and you could use it to train guests to spot marbles you like next time the find them in the wild.

Hah! I believed you. I wouldn't fault you for it. Peeking isn't the same as opening according to some scholars.

Nice meaty Master and an Andre the Bee.

Finally, my mint-range slags have a place called home. No more plastic show-off trays for these classics! Edit: for the pixel peepers, yes I snuck a few Japanese "transitionals" in there.

I'm flirting with other collecting hobbies, but nature photography is becoming my other hobby since I moved to MT. Another collecting hobby I've been drawn to are the vintage tobacco cards. They're small, generally very affordable, and have vast topics and neat artwork.

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