bumblebee

That's a nice lot. I recall seeing a couple of Bulgarian lots that also had clearies and ones with a lot of real looking playwear. Bulgarian Mystery Marbles indeed.

Me too. Origins aside, some of the ones with strong "nines" look very nice. I believe most of those were sold at higher prices early on, but who knows...

FYI, apparently the market for Bulgarians has collapsed. This seller in Bulgaria is selling six for $7.99 with free shipping. I'm guessing you won't get the exact ones pictured but hard to complain at those prices: http://stores.ebay.com/HAPPY-DEALS-MARKET/Sporting-Goods-/_i.html?_nkw=marbles&submit=Search&_sasi=1&_sacat=888&_sid=1187667380

Thanks these are some keepers but not my "brag box" ones since these are in reach of kids' hands. Among them, a genuine marble "blood alley", a lutz belonging to a former mayor of a MT town, 7/8" pelt bought from Al from Oregon years ago, and dozens of other stories. Sometimes I forget just how much my personal history memory of each marble adds to its value in my eyes.

under the circlestances I thought it was marbelous, at least for an amateur shooter like myself.

My solitaire board taken with a Samsung Gear 360 video camera. It does 360-degree videos as well but that would be better suited to a larger collection contained in a couple of tall cases where you could carry the camera between

At this point I'm just happy to have found an NLR that isn't cratered, so I'll let the namers figure out the rest!

Word on the street (via another forum) is these aren't common but they aren't unusually rare, and 11/16" seems to be the common size found. Why it wasn't in the book remains a mystery. Me personally, when I read "green zebra" I see a green zebra with dark green stripes so it doesn't quite fit for me.

They are rarer and more desirable than the later Rainbos, but not everyone has as much trouble as I do finding them.

Few mentions on this forum but here's one referred to as a green zebra:

Got marble mail today and was excited to find an NLR, since I never find them. I immediately opened my new copy of Peltier Glass Toy Marbles and turned to the two-color NLR section. I couldn't find my marble. For a brief moment I got very excited thinking I had something so rare they couldn't find a photo of one. Then I Googled and figured out it's not uber rare. Still, at almost 11/16" and NM+, it's among the 15 or so NLRs I've found in eight years of collecting. I don't see any aventurine.

Got mine today and really enjoying the pictures and looking forward to learning more about Pelts. I only flipped through it and wondered whether it covers the "tweeners" like from this post:

I know, right? That stone cutting is hypnotic.

Nice! Here's a fascinating show on the Oulde Country:

Corned beef and cabbage and soda bread and Guinness all on the menu today, with a heaping piles of spuds of course. I may nip at a half pint of Irish whiskey later. For leftovers, it's hard to beat corned beef on dill rye bread with mustard.

We don't use the fireplace much. I even cut down my own trees and wood this year. It is very cozy, though. I think I would prefer a wood stove more centrally located. I actually prefer going to the fire pit down by the river and doing a big blaze there. Then you really appreciate it with the cold on your back, the bats silently skimming the water, fish jumping, and the occasional dark shape stepping through the woods or swimming on the water.

Gray, gray, wet, icy, gray, GRAY, dirty snow. Mud. Still, temps are puncturing 45 highs so spring is somewhere nearby. And to think we're considering moving to TX for a complete opposite experience!

Just ordered mine and looking forward to learning more about Pelts.

It wouldn't be worth the effort for me to do the master tapes. Somebody with better equipment would be best suited. That being said, I think these are good enough to start with. Interestingly, YouTube detects the classical music on these as copyrighted and that restricts some devices they can be played on. Also puts ads on some of them. I still may move them to Archive.org for that reason but for starters I'm putting them on YouTube because of their color enhancing features.

Wow, that's a lot of tapes to make. They aren't short but luckily the first one ended literally a minute before my DVD ran out. There are quality/color issues on the tape so here's what I did: 1. Ripped to DVD 2. Ripped to digital. 3. Uploaded to YouTube and ran entire video through "auto-fix" using YouTube's tools. This helped with color and contrast. Here's the result here: https://archive.org/details/BlocksBoxMarbleAuction17Part11995March02 Let me know what you think can be improved in terms of color intensity and contrast. I can dial those in manually on YouTube and retry it and probably the same settings will work well with most of the tapes. I prefer putting them on archive.org because it's a non-commercial endeavor and you get options for downloading etc.

I will upload them and provide a link when I am done. My main concern right now is I didn't realize each tape was so long. First one is approaching 2 hours and I don't think my DVD recorder can hold much more than that, so if I have to stop and continue on a new disc it might be tricky patching them together into one file.

Just got Al's box. Am converting the first tape as I type. Tapes are definitely showing their age but still worth preserving, although I'm not sure I'm up to converting Bob's entire library.

My pleasure, thanks. When I'm finished if anyone has more that aren't in Al's lot, I will be happy to covert them to digital format if you'll pay shipping. I know there were more of them but I missed threads in the past where they were offered.

I have a Sony VHS to DVD converter. If nobody else has claimed these I will just to upload them to archive.org to be preserved for the collecting community.

Here's a few new ones (3/4"). The white-based ones are opalescent glass that really shines. Unsure of date except they are at least 30 years old.