Steph

Sparkles! hehe. I feel so taunted. I can post from Photobucket. I get an error message on gallery and attachments. But the problem has been reported to support. Hopefully it will be okay soon.

Thanks Bob, Steve. . . I had red, white and blue. I can't remember if I had other colors. Oh no, PlanB. I got my hopes up. (is this a new problem with uploading pix?)

I tried to load something to the gallery and couldn't. Two people have recently said something about not being able to load pix. I'm not sure if they were trying to load attachments or what the file size was. ... but ... is anyone else having trouble with pix? If you can load pix maybe you can post one here and taunt me with it. lol

Anyone have any pix of Master Cloudys they would care to share? By Cloudy I mean the single colored translucent version. Not the patch which is sometimes called a Cloudy. I had a bunch at one time. Got them in a 1933 cigar box. The cigar box came from the Chicago world's fair and I bet the marbles did too. But I sold most or all of them before I knew what I had. I think I might have kept a few but I'm not sure were I put them. They either don't seem easy to come by, or maybe others don't recognize what they have.

You guys who've been collecting for years and years and even decades ... have they been called corkscrews for as long as you can remember?

What does a CAC Exotic look like? How are they different from regular CAC's?

In case anyone isn't up to speed on the timeline controversy, here is an interesting thread: http://www.landofmarbles.com/phpbb/showthread.php?20233 p.s., the book does say that Fiedler worked at Peltier briefly starting in 1924, so the disagreement appears to be when he left Peltier to go to Christensen.

Still Pelt.

These were listed as Pelt and I believed it at the time.

Would you take some gratuitous cobra admiration?

Came across another firmly ID-ed red, white and blue. Well, it was sitting in plain sight but I didn't make the connection. From the famous Alley sample case: Seems a good time to renew the invitation for any other examples people are confident about. Thanks!

The more I read the more convinced I am that "ballast" came to mean something along the lines of "economy shipping" in addition to its original functional meaning. If a manufacturer/distributor wasn't in a rush then they could get their materials on the ship as space came available. Ships charged money to take goods at a ballast rate. Seems like ships should PAY for ballast instead of CHARGE for ballast if it was just about functionality. But then somewhere along the way people figured out that they could save shipping charges by calling their goods "ballast", and then somewhere else along the way the people running the boats figured out that they didn't need to pay for "ballast". They could actually charge for taking it on board. 1914 book: ".... For the liner, if carrying such goods at all, is carrying them as ballast rather than as cargo, and accepts as a rule a low freight for the service." http://books.google.com/books?id=nn8pAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA191 That's just one example. Won't bog this down with links. I think I remember an 1800's reference to marbles being used as ballast. You may have seen it also and discounted it as an "urban myth" of the day. But the myths are starting to pile up ... seems to me. I can totally see barrels of marbles being treated as low value, low urgency freight and going the economy route. This next article is fairly specific about who is shipping what for how much in connection with marbles from Japan in 1955. Not quite as specific as I'd hope for further google searching. But rather specific nonetheless: "Conference United States Flag Lines advises that Japanese toy glass marbles are loaded as ballast and the cost of shipping from Japan to the United States is only $10.00 per 2000 pounds. Shipping costs on non-conference United States Flag vessels and Japanese Flag vessels are considerably lower." http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o151/modularforms/History/1955_02_17_StMarysOracle_p4_Ballast_ConferenceFlagLines.jpg

I was sort of hoping that someone would start a thread about ballast. I welcome a chance to revisit the topic from time to time. But this angle was definitely not what I expected.

I second that motion!

Not glass??

What does the red one look like on the opposite end? and what do the ends of the green one look like? If it turns out that the green one doesn't look handmade after all, then don't let that one distract from the others! I just had a hunch that they might all be related to some other marbles I've been intrigued by.

To me that looks like a pontil on the red one. I'm going to move this thread to the main forum because sometimes handmade collectors don't make it to the ID forum. p.s., the colors and textures make me wonder if they could be from China.

I made a post here and it disappeared! Should I try again or give up? lol That's a fantastic whimsical piece. Any chance the marble is hollow?

Quick technical note: Akro wasn't producing marbles in 1910. When Akro started business they bought marbles from MFC. Their special gimmick was how they marketed the marbles. Akro put them in prepackaged sets of 5 with the Akro brand. This was a new thing. Akro started making marbles in 1914. I've only had one ballot box. It had black and white bennington style marbles. There were handmade ones in glass, with pontils, like mellonballs. I have that ballot box book. Might be a good day to finally read it all the way through. p.s., it mentions lots of different kind of ballot balls. Even cubical ones. Materials included wood, rubber, composition, and more. Here's a pic of ceramic ballot marbles:

Is it your next birthday yet? Or is this one still going on? Happy belated birthday.

Sorry to see you parting with them. Thanks for letting us know.

yah, he knows.

Marblealan auction ending July 21: http://cgi.ebay.com/350477743520 mrsmaniord auction beginning July 20: http://cgi.ebay.com/130550030530