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bumblebee

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Everything posted by bumblebee

  1. I have a couple that are this darker brown color with bullseyes. In my experience these are less common than the black and white "striped onyx" ones. Structurally they look just like other banded agates to me. I glanced at the book Colonial Period and Early 19th-Century Children's Toy Marbles which says the Brazilian agates (which are naturally grey or or bluish-grey and were sold as "flinties") would first turn brown when left in the sun, then eventually red. Perhaps this style of agate is just the brown stage of sun dyeing? To my eye they are less appealing than the red ones. I don't recall seeing agate ware such as letter openers in this color either, but perhaps someone has. What I couldn't find in the book are descriptions of the colors of locally mined agate used prior to the mass importation of South American agates starting around 1834.
  2. Another sad loss. Very young too. 😭 I referenced his site many times over the years as a great source to see a variety of different marble types.
  3. Wow some great and unusual stuff!
  4. I got a great "owl eye" agate from a privy digger. Had what appears to be a shovel mark on it though. These marbles all have interesting stories. Some were likely thrown in to punish somebody else. Some slipped out of pockets. A few may have been, um, deposited by children who may have swallowed a marble, perhaps?
  5. 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
  6. Those are neat! Patterns resemble vintage rubber balls but look made of sandstone.
  7. 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.
  8. Nice handsome fellow! I've never found that color combo in the wild (not that I find many Pelts anyway!).
  9. 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
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. This way he just tells people to search cedarman7 and his listings come up too.
  13. Yeah I never offer returns on large lots. Would be a nightmare with a dishonest buyer.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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
  17. You're welcome. It's a great book with tons of detail but it might be out of print.
  18. "Colonial Period and Early 19th Century Children's Toy Marbles" by Richard Gartley and Jeff Carskadden (1998)
  19. 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.
  20. Gorgeous. I remember somebody posting Roman glass "marbles" long ago.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. Very old lot, maybe somebody's grandparent brought them over from Europe.
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