HISTORY

[Chad G.]

Well, when did you start marble collecting ?? what ?? why ?? and who got you started. You can include your favorite type if you like. I started in the mid 80's, German handmades were my go to, my Mother gave me the spark as a child when she gave me her favorite shooter, I still have it from when she gave it to me in the late 60's during a move.

                                

                                

[Tommy]

I started collecting in 2020 when I inherited my uncle's marbles they were in jugs and old big bottles,  a gumball machine .with no job I took a deep dive into marbles here and was welcomed and the knowledge shared here and within this site ihas changed me imto a marble head 4 ever

My favorite are American machine made marbles. 

This is where it began with this hoard collected by my grandmother and given to my uncle .then to me ...

 

[cheese]

It started for me in the mid 1980s. Maybe 85 or so. I was visiting my grandparents and my mother went up in the attic and found her old marbles from when she was a kid. There were marbles from the early 1960s on back to turn of the century. I collected anything you can imagine, and knowing they were old interested me. Then when we were at a local antique store, I noticed the owner had some marbles in a case behind the desk. I asked him about them and he loved how much I was interested, so he started telling me about those cool corkscrews I liked so much and others. He sold me a few as I could afford them and I was totally hooked. I asked for old marbles everywhere I went. I thought I had it bad back then... lol if I only knew. But it's just fun, what really matters isn't made of glass. 

[Al Oregon]

I retired back in 1998 and a Realtor friend, Landon Daniels, collected marbles and invited my wife and I over to visit him and see his collection. He put a quilt on the table and opened his safe and started showing some rare or HTF machine-mades and handmades, saying this one is $1,000; this one $2,500; this one $600, etc. He also showed me his shooter Peltier Superman and a Vacor Serpent and mentioned a "little bit" of value difference, even though they looked pretty much the same - especially to me since I knew zip at that time. He said there are many others that are hard to tell apart so "learn before buying". We went to a SeaTac Show in Tacoma a couple months later (just on the Saturday show day) and looked around - ended up buying one marble - a Marble King Bumblebee shooter for $5. After that, I started looking online and determined that buying packaging (mainly marble bags by MK, Peltier, etc.) was a good way to learn about marbles. Of course there were some fantasy bags being made around that time but they were not ones made by marble companies so I knew something was off. Alan Basinet and I got together online and communicated about these fake bags and started letting buyers on eBay know that they were bidding on fake bags (back then you could communicate with buyers and warn them). However, as we all know, eBay needs their fees so soon they changed it so you could not communicate directly with buyers through eBay. But, you could still see the ID of who was bidding and figure out how to get ahold of them and still warn them. Six months later or so, eBay found that out also and quit showing the ID of who was bidding, etc. and here we are today with a "buyer beware" mentality of eBay (and other sites). Oh, by the way, bags were "the thing" for me and 4,000 plus later, they still are. I did heavily collect Akro corks, metallics, Ravenswood and various other machine made marbles over these 25+ years.

[akroorka]

My wife and I collected "slag glass" and  McCoy pottery together for many years. Auctions, flea markets, estate sales, yard sales--etc etc.
Then one day at an antique mall in Oshkosh WI we found this book by the Hardy’s--What? They made marbles too??
This pushed the limit for me--then I found a book by Everit Grist--off we went. 
Of course we had friends that collected other things that thought that we were "nuts" about collecting marbles. 
I had a friend "gift me" a coffee can full of marbles from her ex. I dumped them out and said---oh no--These are too valuable for a gift. About $7,500 later she knew.
This was about 30 years ago and they still hold their value.
About forty books later--here I am.
Then the internet changed it all.

I still have the marbles that my mom gave me from her dad--one was beat up like Chads Akro slag ( nice one by the way)--mine was a Oxblood Eggyolk--just a killer old used up marble. Grandpa played marbles---no doubt.
Marble--On!!