Steph

pretty much for me the question would be how to open it ... and would I have the patience to wait until I consulted with an expert or just go for it myself

Bingo!

I could try to pretend this is on topic. lol. Could mention that marbles were made near here. Maybe not during the time the pic was taken but not too long before. But I won't fake it! :icon_lmao: This just happens to be one of my favorite finds! :Cool_049: It was in a vintage storage case for color slides. At an antique shop a few blocks from me. I went there a lot, and looked at it several times before I bought it. Only $15 bux. Can't believe I thought so hard about whether I would buy it, but I did. I had a use for it. Some old family slides which were loose in a box ... and are still. The saleslady offered to dump the slides which were already in it. No ulterior motives -- she just wanted to make it easy on me -- they would end up in her waste basket instead of mine. Who needed someone else's old family photos of weddings, pony rides and picnics from the 50's and 60's? That sort of thing. But I said, nah, I'd take 'em home. Might be something interesting. I sold this first slide for $75. Anyone recognize the buildings? It was the one in the distance which was the draw. Might've been able to get more for this one and others taken that day if I'd had a clue what kind of market there was for them and built up some awareness that they were on the market instead of starting with the best ones first. But $75 was alright! Someone who took the $20 to $30 buy-it-now on one of the related photos helped me learn more about all of them. (click to enlarge)

1930's

A folded pricelist from Akro, found with a 1926 letter also from Akro. The pricelist is sealed with a 1 1/2 cent Warren Harding stamp. (click to enlarge) The letter advertising Cornelians, already opened:

real marbles? meaning vintage? or? are they shooters?

I can't remember if I've ever seen an American-made with a real reverse 9. The last time I remember the subject coming up I think all the possible examples turned out to be a regular 9 more or less but the ribbon was so tall that we could see it from the other side and so it looked reversed. Or maybe some other sort of oddness but I think they didn't really look like true reverse 9's on closer examination. A true reverse 9 would be be very rare anyway, right?

A couple of old threads which have a lot of missing pictures and broken links, but leaving the links for now: Mostly Pix - Akro Links: Original Packaging Currently working in restoring the photos in this thread. -- 9/22/2019

I'll ask again, but I'm pretty sure that's all the seller knew. He goes to China periodically and buys them from a digger. There are two things I find interesting about these 'transitionals' in comparison with the handmades and in comparison with slag-type marbles from other sources. One is that I think I might be seeing a continuum of pontil types, possibly linking the transitionals with the frit marbles, as if the same shearing tool may have been used on both types, but maybe under different conditions. more hastily on the transitionals? different person? different year? A completely different thing which I would still find curious even if I'm wrong about the pontils: The reverse 9s. I don't pay the best attention to threads about slag-type marbles since I haven't made a lot of connection with them yet, but I seem to remember that it's very rare to have the tail wrapping in the direction it does on these. So if my recollection is correct, I wonder if these are signs of a different marble making tradition.

Intriguing ad for an American publication to run ... From a 1927 Playthings. I assume machine made because it says patented and because of the price. (click to enlarge)

oops, sorry about that. the other thread had a lot of lookers but no takers. I wasn't sure the shanghai part would be seen if I just added it to the other thread. I'm asking on someone else's behalf so I wanted to make sure it got seen. I'm very intrigued by the reverse twists on the 'transitionals'. It's far from typical if I understand correctly.

they came from a dump site in Shanghai.

Okay, let's try it a different way What do you think about these being found together in a dumpsite in Shanghai?

I shall have to stop looking at the pontils for awhile. I notice something new about them each time I look. I'll just note this last observation and then wait to hear what anyone else has to say. Here it is: The green one might have more similarity with the others than at first it seemed. It appears to also have a sort of 2nd mark. The amber's 2nd mark in the middle seemed almost like a 2nd shear perpendicular to the first, but that was too weird a thought to be able to get a handle on. But it seems worth commenting on now because the green's "sort of 2nd mark" is also sort of perpendicular. It is two indentations across the line from each other..

These are 1/2" to 21/32", dug from the same dumpsite. They had larger kin, including confettis which were at least 1 and 1/8". The one with blue spots has externally applied drizzle -- dark olive -- which dips into the blue in places + one interesting pinkish red striped rectangular patch. I think the rectangle is the same material as one the bits of 'frit' in the confetti. That's what I tried to show in the first pic. Is frit the right word? That piece in the confetti is not just a simple bit of colored glass. To me it looks like fine pink stripes maybe around a slender white rod. Under a loupe I see that the pink in the patch is transparent. Hard to tell otherwise. The guy who sold them had other opaques with drizzle. Beautiful orange thin (really thin) swirl....or yellow.......or blue..........that did not swirl around the entire marble, just the upper part. Let's see, the ones which might be called transitionals look familiar in a way, and different too, but maybe that's just because I don't have much experience with them. The two smallest look like they have reverse 9's. Maybe the middle sized one also, but it's a little more globby and harder to trace. The amber has more of a ying yang looking thing where I'd expect the 9. To my untrained eye they appear to have been snipped off of punties. The green one looks the most cleanly snipped. The others look like there may have been a little bit of snapping along with the snipping. Each seems to have at least remnants of longish indented lines like the green but also a wider spot in the middle which looks like the glass might have been colder when that mark was made. Looking at them all again, I think the pontils on those three look more like the pontil on the confetti than the one on the green. (edit: I wouldn't have thought of the green's shear mark as being much like the confetti's pontil, but with the others in between, I could see them as being on opposite ends of range of variation) The mib with sprinkling of blue on one side and green on the other also had a sprinkling of pink or red once upon a time. But the frit has fallen out. It didn't come through clearly but that's what I tried to show in this next pic. This mib has the softest looking pontil. Maybe like the others and maybe a little something done to it to smooth it out. ?

yeah, terry, that would be a fun way to spend a month

Most people are. :Happy_050:

can't get enough!

I think this is most of an article on MFC which appeared in a Canadian trade journal, Bookseller and Stationer. Volume 26, which I think was from 1910. Google Books only wanted to give me one "snippet" but I tickled it until it gave me three. A complete copy of the page should be available from Princeton by interlibrary loan through your local library. (source) For fun, here is a 1900 edition. It does have a couple of references to marbles. Nothing fancy. For more fun, completely unrelated to Bookseller and Stationer or MFC or Canada, but I found it when trying to get the link for this post ;-) Songsheets published by a marble warehouse

My screen is 1280 x 1024

Cees, is this your site?!

Knikkerwereld An interesting historical page: Machinale glazen knikkers -- It speaks of the history of machine-mades in general, in American, Germany, Japan and other countries, with specific references to marbles found in the Netherlands. Their "other uses" page: Functie -- Check out the coffee-keeper-warmers, and the boring white ceramic balls from a paint factory. LOL, on page 2, bottle stoppers like Craig posted recently. It suggests that one of their uses was to stop flying insects from getting into the bottle. And then there's one totally new to me -- a codd-like bottle of ink. You could fill the top chamber with ink for convenient dipping; the marble stopped the ink from draining back down to the bottom chamber too quickly. And under the "Soorten" drop down menu, a whole lot of marble photos. While I was in the google neighborhood I followed this link: a 2005 entry at an archaeology site, it gave me the following link National Marble Tournament Site My favorite word so far from the tournament site: kinderknikkeren. Isn't that great! For translating from the Dutch: http://babelfish.yahoo.com Babelfish note: I hadn't ever translated a whole page there at once. Now I see that once you get the translation of the first page, Babelfish will also translate the links you follow. BUT (important but) there were pages at Knikkerwereld I could only get to from the orginal dutch version. Those were pages which had been linked to in drop down menus.

I thought I had that one. but I do not. Only Gene Florence's and the Hardy's. Yeah, I don't have all of Mr. Sturtz's either.

Starting with ... Champion Dug examples from Rinesmarbles' auctions: