Steph

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:

(((((((hugs)))))))

awesome

Some of the sites I've used: Newspapers Old Fulton New York Post Cards -- Search Over 7,486,000 Old New York State Historical Newspaper Pages New York Times Archives -- Article through 1922 are free to download NewspaperArchive.com -- a premium site with a lot of smaller papers [edit: I am able to access it for free from my local library's website. you might have that option also.] Google News Archive Search -- Another way to get to some of the old news articles. I like the "Show Timeline" option. Census, etc. Ancestry.com -- another premium site. This one has a two-week free trial period. You can do census searches here. Many other records are available. I also found I could get larger copies of the same newspapers I had found at newspaperarchive.com. If the large versions are available at newspaper.com, I need help figuring out how to get to them.Toy Catalogs Antique Toy Archives -- they have lots and lots of pdf files. Many marble ads can be found in unlikely places. I found a 1914 Akro ad in a bundle of ads devoted to toys with bells in themPhotos American Social History Online -- I posted some of the marble-related images here Books, magazines, etc. Google Books -- you can get to some technical resources here. Some are full-view. Some may be harder to access but usually you'll find a list of libraries which have them.There are more I need to remember, or stumble upon again. Some Google thoughts: Going to advanced preferences on Google to limit output to PDF format is one way to get a higher percentage of historical items in your search results. In Google Books, sometimes the texts are restricted to views of "snippets". You can sometimes tease out the bulk of an article with creative use of keywords. If you quote the first or last part of one snippet, and do a Google search on that, you might be able to ease your way into another snippet, and get more material to quote to ease your way into the next. One more thing to keep in mind is that if you find only a title on one site, you might be able to find a full view version of the same thing on another site. Google Books gives only a little peek at the report on the lawsuit filed against MJ Gropper and Sons, the suit where it was declared misleading to call glass marbles "onyx". However, regular google searches come up with the full text of both the report on the original filing and the report on the outcome of the case. Oh yes, don't forget about offline options, such as major libraries. One might call or email them if one cannot visit.

I just found a new one today. Later I'll try to add ones I've used before. Australian newspaper archive Not only is this a free resource but you might be able to help make it better. I did a search for "agate marbles" and got a 1925 article which was translated as Kcal Agate Marbles. That was exciting, because what I wanted to find was actually California Agate marbles. Wellllll, it turned out that what the paper had actually said was "Real Agate Marbles". A little disappointing but still a good find. And then after I made a note of it, I fixed the translation. The site invites you to do that. It was translated electronically in bulk, and now humans have a chance to fix the little errors as they come across them.