Moved Marble Collection…
Refrain From Stupid Jokes…
Heard them all.
The only collections I kept on the move to Vegas was first a digest collection of mystery and sf digests. They are way cool and are close to complete from 1943 to 1999 in mystery, sf, fantasy, and horror. Missing a few issues here and there, but unless I get them out on shelves again, I just can’t tell. (They are in boxes in an air-conditioned interior storage unit. Got a hunch they will remain there into the future. They take up a lot of room to say the least.)
The second collection I kept was marbles. 3 to 4 hundred thousand of them. (Not kidding.) From 1800s German hand-mades to 1920s-1950s US marbles from many different companies. Took me a full load of the boxes and displays yesterday to move them to the new office and then today a second full SUV-load. I wanted to move the marbles and get them out of the way of the movers who will move shelving and desks and stuff to our new office in a week.
And yes my shoulder is working great lifting heavy boxes. Yay!!
So tomorrow, the new WMG office here in Vegas gets cleaned, then desks and shelves and stuff start to arrive next week, as soon as I can schedule a mover. And the big desk in the back of my office here goes down to the office as well. That will be my marble desk.
Damn, even with the bad eyes, it will be fun to have that collection out again.
And after the movers get stuff moved, I will get rid of one huge storage unit to offset the new office costs.
So a fun day here. I almost felt young again moving boxes around. And planning where desks and shelves were going to go. And great exercise for my weight loss as well. (grin)
5 Comments
Emilia
Can you take a few pictures of the collection? They sound cool. I had few marbles as a kid, but they’re lost to time.
dwsmith
The key would not be your marbles, but your grandfathers or great grandfathers. Leather bags of marbles from the 1920s still appear from attics. But sadly very few of us collect that art form anymore.And they are art, especially the hand-made German glass from the 1800s. A few modern artists are making some stunning ones also.
Mark Kuhn
I remember when I was kid there was nothing more fun — and I mean nothing — than a new bag of marbles. The mesmerizing patterns inside them and the colors. So cool.
Heather Brinkerhoff
What’s the best way to display a whole lot of marbles?
Ideally, if you were going to have them out, for looking. I have never seen a museum, say, display a collection- or any.
dwsmith
I have some of the best ones in cases, like old wooden silverware cases that I have written the silverware interior out of and replaced with marble displays. Often plastic. One silverware case will hold a hundred or so marbles, usually of the same company or vintage. I will over time take some pictures and put them here. A vast number of them are loose and unsorted. To move those I put a layer in a file box, put a layer of bubble wrap, another layer of marbles, and so on until the box was about half full and too heavy to lift. Got about ten of those unsorted boxes like that. Stupid numbers of marbles.
The fun is that an expensive vintage marble worth $500 can often look like a modern marble worth a penny if that.