I had noticed the Cream of Wheat ad but had not really noticed it. You know, the way you see something out of the corner of your eye but you move on rather than stopping…
Category: collectibles
Gumball machine with lamp
Posted in collectibles, furniture, and Home
As soon as I saw the gumball machine with the white globe, I thought it’d look nifty on my windowed front porch. It stood out among the indoor and outdoor furniture set up on the pavement…
Tips on figuring out what your stuff is worth
Posted in Auction Tips/Find an Auction, Books, and collectibles
I got an email recently from a woman who had three watercolors by MC “Five Cent” Jones that her parents had bought 20 years ago. Her mother is 91 years old, and the daughter wanted…
Collections that baffle me: (rusty) soda cans
Posted in collectibles, and Tins
“Tell me this isn’t someone’s collection,” I said incredulously to the auction-goer browsing next to me. Spilling out of a ripped plastic bag was a stash of rusty soda cans. They looked like they had been…
Elvis Presley memorabilia
Posted in collectibles, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Records
Sometimes at auction, I’ll buy a box lot of stuff without even having checked it out. Usually, there’s something neat tucked down in the bottom, maybe of little valuable but interesting anyway. That happened a…
Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant auction
Posted in Asian, collectibles, and Signs
Even the prices of the reproductions were way too high. That’s how us auction-regulars felt about the sale of memorabilia that once hung on the walls of the now-closed Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia. Collectors and…
Judaica artifacts are a mystery to me
Posted in collectibles, Culture, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Religion
The special items up for auction that Sunday in December smacked you right in your face as you walked through the door. They were laid out on tables, stacked on shelves in glass cases, hung on…
Bazooka bubble gum comics
Posted in collectibles, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and Games
The white envelope was pretty inconspicuous there on the auction table, because I had passed the table several times and had not noticed it. This time, though, I was just picking up stuff – two…
A secret love for model trains
Posted in collectibles, and Toys
I always imagined having a locomotive and its cars rumbling around the tracks in my basement. It didn’t matter that for much of my life I never had a basement for such a setup, but I’d…
Classics Illustrated’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ comic book
Posted in Books, collectibles, and Comic books
I keep bumping into intriguing comic books at my favorite auction houses. Some seem to force themselves into my path, while others wait for me to stumble across them while I’m plying through papers and other…