BobBlock

Sitting about 100 miles north of the expected landfall. They reported on the radio a little while ago that they expect the worst flooding in Long Island Sound... ever. Luckily, we're up on a ridge at about 300 feet, so we'll be fine, but I suspect that my father-in-law's boat is going to come off the top of the pilings down at Milford Harbor. My wife's biggest concern is that we'll have trees come down on the horse fences and then we'll have to run around the neighborhood getting them back.

Nice chunk of pyrite. Pyritohedral cluster style. Pyrite's my favorite mineral, I have a whole shelf of it in my display case :-)

He had emailed me several weeks ago and I asked for additional images before I made an offer. Specifically I wanted to see the end tab with the type of marble on it, and the pic of the marbles did not include the whole box. They never came, and then it showed up here, so I moved on.

Not the rarest marble in my collection, or the most valuable, but this is the one I would take if I had to give the rest up. It was my Dad's. He bought it about 40 years ago. Supposedly it was plowed up in a field. It's been pictured in a couple of the books. He gave it to me about 3 or 4 years ago.

Couldn't find any photos from those early shows :-( Just a reminder Marble CyberAuction #1104 is this Sunday night at 8PM NYC time. This is a live chat room auction with prior absentee bidding. The catalogue can be viewed at http://www.icollector.com/auction.aspx?as=24641 . You can also register to bid at that site, as well as leave absentee bids or watch/bid live on Sunday night. I have also set up a page at http://www.marblecyberauction.com for auction night that has the icollector live page on the left side of the screen and the auction chat room on the right hand side. It's pretty ugly. The auction is part of the collection of Joe Rocco of Brooklyn. The history of the collection is appended to the beginning of the PDF version of the catalogue, which you can find at http://www.marblecollecting.com/marble-auctions/block-s-marble-cyberauctions/ , I'll give a short synopsis here. Joe began collecting in the 1960s. He was owner of Strider Records in Greenwich Village, and customers would bring marbles to trade to him for records. Go figure! Joe was an avid collector until his death in 1993. I remember him coming to the first marble shows my Dad ran in Connecticut back in the 1970s. Joe's collection was packed away into the basement by his widow immediately following his death and has sat there ever since. She sold the house recently, so that was the impetus for moving the collection out of the basement. It consists of handmades and machine mades, with some very early contemporaries thrown in.

I think UPS depends on which driver you get that day. You have to come down a 125 foot long narrow drive through the woods to get to our main driveway. We have one driver that opens up our garage door and leaves the packages inside (which is great!), one driver who just leaves them on top of the retaining wall (had an entire case of price guides ruined in the rain that way) and a third driver who just tosses it on the grass by the driveway all the way up at the street.

Great Smitty. I popped it on my website calendar for you. BTW, the date on the Buckeye MCC site is wrong.

Good one Bill! Zaboo, I've found that I have a much better record with the USPS over the past couple of years since I started printing out online labels with delivery confirmation on them. Before that I would say they were easily losing at least 1 in a hundred and probably more. Now, I think there has only been one package in the past year that didn't make it to its destination. My bigger problem has been that one of these subcontracted postal annexes opened up in the quickie mart down the street from me. Sometimes I'll drop the packages in the bin there on my way to work and sometimes my wife will drop them off at the post office. I've found, for some reason, that packages that get dropped in the quickie mart bin invariably take 3 or 4 days longer to get to their destination than those dropped at the PO. I can see one day, but 3 or 4 is really confusing.

No response to email that I sent yesterday. I went back through the Ebay Messages and there was nothing in there from him either. They'll go on my dead box shelf for a while.

I received two packages in the mail today. They were packages of marbles I sold on Ebay that I had mailed to the same person in South Africa. They were returned to me as Undeliverable Addressee Unknown. The best part is that I mailed them on October 6, 2011. Yes, you read right, 2011. They are marked as Undeliverable by the South Africa Post on August 2, 2012. So, it took them over 10 months to decided they could not be delivered, and then it took an additional 2-1/2 months to get back to me. I wonder if that is some kind of record?

I'm going to dig out some photos over the weekend from those late 1970s marble shows and scan them in over the weekend. There should be one or two of Joe in the pile.

CyberAuction #1104 is up on my website and on icollector. The full catalogue and how to participate are at http://www.blocksite.com/marble-auctions/block-s-marble-cyberauctions/ This is the start of the Joe Rocco collection. Here's a little writeup that is in the catalogue about Joe. Joe owned Strider Records in Greenwich Village and began collecting in the 1960s. (Go to http://jazzcollector.com/guest-columns/guest-column-more-tales-of-the-hunt/#more-3520 to see a great story about a record deal Joe was involved in. All the marbles in this auction came out of the basement described at the end of the story). He was known in The Village (and throughout the metropolitan area) to be a marble collector. Customers would often bring marbles into the store in the 70s and 80s and trade them for records. He also frequented the Manhattan flea markets. Can you imagine what it must have been like to go to flea markets back in the 1970s and 1980s? I can still remember Joe and his wife, Marie, coming to the marble shows that my dad held in Fairfield and Westport Connecticut in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Joe passed away in 1993 and Marie packed the entire collection into boxes and put them in the basement of their house. Nothing was touched in the intervening 19 years. I found the boxes still stacked the way they were back in 1993. When I started unpacking boxes I found a number of marbles that we had auctioned back in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Block’s Box Absentee Marble Auctions 1 through 9. This collection offers a unique window into marble collecting habits prior to the explosion of interest in marbles in the 1990s. Back in the 70s and 80s, marble collecting was still in its infancy as a hobby. Many antique dealers considered them a novelty and didn't take the hobby seriously. This stage of the hobby was prior to the point where the really colorful and Mint handmades were coming over from Europe, and before the Berlin Wall came down. It was very difficult to find quality handmade marbles at that time. Large Mint handmades were especially rare, and many collectors bought damaged handmades and had them polished. In addition, virtually no one was collecting machine made marbles. The Larry Castle/Marlow Peterson book did not come out until 1989 and knowledge of machine made companies and product lines was very limited. Joe was a true collector. He bought what he liked and what appealed to him. He wasn't in the hobby as an investment, he reveled in the sheer joy of having beautiful marbles to look at. Many of the large handmades, as is typical of this period, are polished so that you can see the internal design. There are a lot of handmade rarities in this collection, although all are not Mint. On the machine made side, Joe liked colors and patterns, so there is an interesting predominance of Christensen Agates and very early Alleys. There are also the more typical Akros and Peltiers. Joe also bought contemporaries that he liked. Since his collection froze at 1993, there are not many contemporaries, and only very early artists are represented. In addition, most of the contemporaries are not signed, as this did not become the norm until later in the 1990s.

You're welcome. Lawrence Alley III was at the show too, and introduced himself, but I didn't get a picture of him. There were probably a few other board lurkers there as well. But, I was so busy from the middle of setup until the end of the show that I didn't have a chance to take any other pictures. It was a good show. The walkthrough was much better than the past couple of years and sales seemed to be a lot better as well. Bert had every table sold (actually he had oversold!). And it was busy right up to the end of the show, which was also a welcome change from prior years. A good percentage of the people who walked through the show were people I had never seen before. So, maybe things are starting to turn a corner.

A few more pics. Stan Block Alphy Bard and Tony Banas (I think) setting up the Nutmeg Club's display Jim Fairneny in the foreground, Kris Parke (and his daughter, who's name escapes me) in the background

A few pics I took with my iphone during setup. Unfortunately I didn't take many, it was busy. Dave Terrell Eddie Seese Bert Cohen

All of my images in the past year or so have been taken with a Sony HX10 that I bought off Ebay for under $200. Another $50-$60 for a lightbox setup off of Ebay and 20 bucks for a tripod, and you're good to go. There is absolutely no reason to spend anywhere near $500 for a camera to take marble pictures.

If anyone wants to try with their own dinosaur Sony Mavica (FD71?), I have one laying around. :-) This is the camera that you have to slide 5-1/4" floppy discs into it, because there is no onboard memory (can you even get those discs anymore?). Long before memory sticks, SD cards, etc. It probably has some historical value because I shot some early auctions with it (probably around auction 12-20 or something like that). I even still have the charger. I tried giving it to one of my kids, but they have ipod touches with cameras, so they've turned their noses up at it :-) Check this out on Ebay, you can buy a lot of 5 for $20! http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-5-Sony-Mavica-MVC-FD71-0-4MP-Digital-Camera-W-Strap-Batteries-Parts-/140827524613?pt=Digital_Cameras&hash=item20c9f97e05

I've found over the years that lighting is more important than anything else. If you don't have a good lighting setup, then it doesn't matter how much you spend on your camera and tripod, you're not going to get good images. After that then I'd agree on the tripod. You're taking closeups of small objects, so movement is a lot less forgiving than if you were taking portraits. Finally, go to Best Buy (or PC Richards or whatever) and look at the cameras you are interested in, set them to macro and see how close up and clear you can focus on the letters on the price cards they have next to the cameras. If you can't focus up close on the letters, you're not going to be able to focus on a marble.

CyberAuction #1103 catalogue is now published. The auction will be on Sunday September 30 at 9:00PM NYC time. For the time being, I will be running the CyberAuctions at icollector.com. I'm exploring some other options, but this seems to have the best software at the moment for collecting absentee bids and for running the virtual live auction. The chat capabilities are not as good as I'd like, but none of the virtual auctions has good chat. You can view everything at http://www.icollector.com/1103-Marble-Auction_as24640 as well as registering to submit absentee bids and participate live. You can view the link to the auction and information on how to participate at http://www.blocksite.com/marble-auctions/block-s-marble-cyberauctions/ Bidding is online via icollector, by email or phone to me, or live on the night of the auction. Payment is via Paypal (preferred), credit card, check or money order. I had originally set it up with a buyer's premium to recover the icollector and paypal fees, but I'm changing it to NO BUYERS PREMIUM. So, what you bid is what it costs you. Shipping, as with my Ebay auctions, is actual cost plus about a buck to cover the packing materials. This one is a short auction, only 50 lots. I'm getting the folks who do my imaging and shipping trained, so I wanted to keep it small. I do all the cataloguing, sizing and grading. I don't leave that to anyone else.

Interesting Marble Run that is catalogued as Civil War era at Alexander's Autograph auctions next month. Here's the link http://auctions.alexautographs.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=48++++++1044+&refno=+++73487 and an image

I think the ones that break apart are older than the ones that are that solid plastic with no marble in them. I've dropped several and they fall apart, so maybe if you smack it against a table or other hard surface it will just break apart for you.

According to the Buckeye Marble Collectors Club website, the August show is their annual show. And the February show is run by them as well. So why isn't the work and responsibility being spread out among more of the club members? I get that someone has to take the lead, but it should be a group effort.

I can remember my Dad running marble shows in Fairfield and Westport Connecticut back in the mid 1970s. At that time, there would be maybe 8 to 10 dealers/collectors set up. And even then someone would complain about another person getting a table closer to the door. Nothing really changes. I think Chuck in his posting above made some really good points. I would like to add a few. 1. It is virtually impossible for a marble show to break even. Unless you do no advertising. Considering the incredible amount of time that the person or person running the show put into it, you're only going to run a show for the "joy" of bringing marble collectors together. I ran several shows back in the 1990s, and they always cost me money. That was why I ran an auction with my shows. To help cover the costs. That's why Bert runs an auction the day before his show. I know that the dealers hate having an auction at the show because they feel it sucks money away from their potential customers. I've never understood that argument. You bring in more people and more money to the show, and if the auction is not huge, no one is going to spend anywhere near their budget. In fact, they will be more inclined to buy from the dealers, because they wanted something at the auction that got away. This is why most numismatic shows have auctions associated with them. 2. Someone mentioned about the potential conflict of interest bcause the show promoter also runs marble auctions and might divert walk-in marbles to his auctions. I think if someone walks into the show and has a collection to sell, they would not be doing their homework properly if they didn't talk to the show promoter about the best way to sell it. Considering the amount of time and expense the promoter has put into the show, I don't think this is a big deal. The only time this would be an issue, in my mind, would be if the show was actually being run by a marble club that was a 501©3 and the club had paid for the advertising and to rent the showroom. In that case, the "promoter" or "show manager" is really volunteering his time to the club, and it would endanger the club's tax exempt status if the show manager reaped a benefit from the show. 3. Someone bemoaned the fact that less "new blood" is coming into the hobby and the hobby is dying. I've been hearing this complaint for almost 30 years. True, you don't have the influx of collectors that you saw back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But, that period of time was an anomaly. That was a the rapid growth phase in the life cycle of the hobby. If you are going to view the current state of the hobby through that prism, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Considering the current economic environment, I would view the current rate of collectors joining the hobby as positive. The past 5 years you have seen the effects of the maturation of the hobby and the resultant stretching out of marble prices, and the contraction experienced by all collectibles due to the economy. The fact that the Marble Price Guide was the #2 selling antique/collectible toy book on Amazon in July, I think proves that there are plenty of people interested in marble collecting. The way to increase walk-in to a show is to convince people that shows are fun and that they are the best place to buy marbles and meet collectors. 4. Someone made the comment that you should rent the hall for several days. This won't work. You can't possibly recover the cost of the rental from the table fees you charge. Many dealers would not pay twice or thrice the rental fee that is currently charged at shows. And the marble collecting hobby is not so large that you would get good walkthrough over multiple days. I think the one day format that we currently have is the best. 5. A number of people here have commented about in-room buying and selling before a show. At least one person said it should be banned. It would be impossible for a show promoter to do that. Show promoters can't even stop people from sitting in the lobby buying and selling (Gary tried that 20 years ago in Amana and finally gave up), how are you going to stop in-room buying and selling. It's a bad idea anyways. A large part of the marble show experience revolves around the in-room trading. In my opinion, we should encourage in-room trading, not discourage it. I feel it only serves to bring more people to the event. Yes, there are some people who only do in-room trading and don't buy a table at the show. So what? There are leeches in every facet of society. It just comes with running the show. I guess a promoter could go around to the rooms and try to sell tables, and if the person doesn't want a table you could ask them for a contribution to defray the cost of the show. But, realistically, if they are going to balk at buying a table at the show, they're going to balk at contributing. 6. What we should be doing is advertising the fact that marble shows are the absolute best place to buy marbles. I am constantly saying this to new collectors who email me and I say it in my books. There is no better place to buy marbles. Better than auctions, better than Ebay, better than antique shows, better than antique shops, better than marble dealer websites. Over the past 35 years I have consistently gotten my best buys at marble shows. Yeah, occasionally I'll get lucky at an auction, like the one in Deerfield last year, but that happens maybe once every few years. When I go to a marble show, I am virtually guaranteed that I'm going to buy some really nice marbles at truly cheap prices. It's all supply and demand. The ratio of supply to demand is tilted farther towards supply at a marble show than at any other venue. That's the message we should be putting out there. I want to conclude by saying, Steve don't quit. People are always going to complain to you, they are always going to complain about you, there are some that are always going to be unhappy. Ignore them. You'll never make them happy. The plain fact is that there are tons more people who think you do a great job with the show. The Ohio show has a long and proud tradition, going all the way back to when Bill and Betty ran it. You are doing a great job continuing that legacy, you should keep at it.

Considering the amount that Ebay hoses sellers for, I don't think we need to shed any tears for Ebay.

I usually don't comment on the board about these things. But, in this case I find it funny that the seller uses my name to justify the marble being Mint, and then in private email to a potential buyer (who questioned that it was not a true 7-color based on my books) he trashes me for not knowing anything about marbles. Too funny!