Synagogue In a Teapot

It may look like a fancy teapot,  but the owner found it had a secret hidden inside:  the teapot disassembled into everything needed to perform various Jewish rites and holidays:

The Redditor who posted this amazing piece of metalwork said he had gotten it from his Jewish grandfather before he died, and the appraisers of Reddit went wild:  although the original poster doesn’t voice any opinion on its origins, various experts — and truly experts, people who work in museums and history departments — interpreted it as ranging from anywhere from the Inquisition to World War II, figuring it was used by Jewish people to conceal their religion from people who would harm them for their faith.   It seems like a reasonable interpretation, right?   Why else would you go all Optimus-Prime on your religious items so that they fold up neatly into an innocuous item that conceals their true purpose?

Many people suggested that this pot could be a truly historical find, with much Indiana-Jonesing over how IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM, but it turns out they’re talking about the wrong kind of museum.

Because the internet is such a vast place, of course somebody else had one of their own, and knew its origins:

The piece actually belongs in an art gallery before it should be sent to any world archives of Judaical history.   It is actually an art piece made by artist Yossi Swed, of Swed Master Works in New York, within the past twenty years.

There’s lessons in this story, like a dreidel hidden in a teapot.   First of all:   Expert make mistakes; you might take a valuable item to an appraiser and they might, really, not actually know what it is and are giving their best educated guess.   Second: the kind of expert makes a difference: I’d bet that a silversmith, with no expertise in Jewish tradition, would have been more valuable in determining the age of this work than the chair of Judaism at a university.    And, lastly, the obvious isn’t always the truth; while this teapot was seemed to clearly be of historical Holocaust-related value, it turns out it was purely a work of art.   Every collector and dealer knows the perils of buying something you don’t completely know the origins of, and this is a perfect example of how, on many levels, things are rarely ever what they seem.

Authentic Antique Pioneer & Farm Homesteading Ephemera

Found here in North Dakota, this antique promotional booklet is an authentic piece of pioneering & homestead farming history! Compliments of Samuel Lange, a dealer in Farm Machinery, such as Buggies and Carriages, Cream Separators, Plymouth Twine, Defiance Listers & Plows, La Cross Disk Harrows, pioneer Buggies, Surries & Wagons, agent for Queen City Creamery Co. “Highest Paid Prices for Cream.”

Also noted inside the front and back covers, Mc Cormick Binders, Mowers & Hay Rakes, Plano & Mc Cormick repairs, Racine Cultivators & Plows, Wenzelman Steele Grain Dump, Empire Ball Bearing, Neck Bearing Cream Separator.

Inside, the little book from 1908 is filled with facts — from foreign currency conversion to census data, from color maps to business laws, and more. Plus, there are pages for the owner to write down addresses, notes, ledger details, and calender dates.

Booklet measures 5 and 3/4 inches by 3 inches and is available for sale in our Etsy shop. Also included, a small piece of handwritten ephemera which was found inside and we feel should remain with this lovely old piece.

Vintage Industrial & Primitive Candle Holders

Vintage dairy cream separator funnels have a great industrial look — and a great primitive look when rusty.

They make great candle stick holders!

If you plan on lighting the candles, you should place them on an appropriate heat resistant/fire-safe container — antique saucers and plates work well for this and you can even mix and match leftover saucers or find a use for those in not-so-great condition. You might even want to weave some lace or ribbon in the holes to play up the textures against the old metal. …And if you are using ribbons and things, why not add some vintage buttons too? There are lots of possibilities.

Don’t Touch the Bed Doll

This bed doll with her crocheted dress comes from Etsy, GK and TEA.

A long, long time ago my Mother bought me a doll, a bed doll. It was a beautiful doll with an elegant white gown, ribbon flowers and her hair done up in a fancy way. I kept her for a very long time, but she was always made me sad. No fault of the doll. It was one of the things I did which I later regretted.

When we bought the doll my Mother explained that she was meant to be kept on the bed to look pretty. You don’t play with her, you don’t undress her (some of the dress was not meant to be taken off it was sewn on the doll body to an exact fit), most of all, you don’t un-do her hairstyle. I said I would remember all that and just have her sit on my bed. My Mom was hoping this would be another reason for me to get into the habit of making my bed each morning. Sadly, it didn’t work out.

I never get into the bed making habit. Worse, it was not long before my curious mind had to get to work on her hair. Well, some things you just can’t ever fix or put back the way they originally were. She wore the same dress, mostly untouched but her hair was never the same again. So, I always felt a bit bad for letting my Mom down.

Bed dolls seem an old fashioned thing now. But, I like the old fashioned, romantic things. I was glad to find a bed doll with a home made crochet outfit on Etsy. There were a few of them. I wonder if they sell well or hang around, waiting for some silly curious girl to come along and mess up their hair.

This is a vintage bed doll with an old china face and a dress (not crocheted). From the Fritzy Etsy shop.

Celebrity Skull Collecting

A few weeks ago, Eva Mendes was spotted with a skull in her Kiki de Montparnasse lingerie bag — which sent the celeb-stalking world into a 50-Shades of kink gossip cliche tailspin. But as it turns out, the antique papier-­mâché skull, a ceremonial prop from an Odd Fellows lodge, was purchased at Obscura of Oddities fame. More about Mendes and “her favorite home-décor store” in this article.

Vintage Casino Chips For Framed Wall Art

Are you a heavy collector of weird (as others may perceive) yet cool stuff? Want to try something new to hang on your wall? Usually, it’s a painting, a cross-stitch, a vintage movie poster or a celebrity sketch that would make a sophisticated and noticeable framed wall art. For this year, here is the challenge: why not come up with a framed artwork featuring the oldest casino chips that you can find? One might argue that this is an expensive and a very difficult challenge for hobbyists and collectors like me. Poker chips are unique to every casino. The designs before are so intricate as compared to the latter ones. As opposed to coin collecting, this is not an expensive variety of exonumia for these tokens aren’t made of silver or gold.

If you intend on pursuing the project, you can either collect in person or purchase online. My Vegas Chips online sells poker chips manufactured from 1930s to 1960s at a reasonable price. You can never tell if those vintage chips have been used by artists, musicians or famous poker players who played in the casino. You can also purchase some from your online friends over at Partypoker.com. The largest virtual poker room aside from offering virtual casino games also provides a virtual community and social lounge for members to interact. You might meet someone who’s also a collector or someone who’s a son-of-a-poker-legacy who happened to have an old chip to dispose of.

Below are some of the surprisingly cheap vintage chips (price range from $15 to $35) that you can purchase from My Vegas chips:

ROULETTE SILVER PALACE YERINGTON
This obsolete old vintage casino chip was manufactured in the 1930s. There are plenty of stocks left dedicated for avid collectors. It is available in yellow, brown and navy blue colors. There are no signs of warping and the golden engraved Silver Palace Yerington Nevada is still visible and clear. The size of the chip is 39mm in diameter. A bubble wrap case is included upon delivery for protection.

HARRAH’s CLUB RENO LAKE TAHOE
Harrah’s Club Reno casino is still operational as of date but you can’t purchase this rare poker chip manufactured in the 1960s if you are planning to go to the casino today. Actually, this rare chip is still on stock but the conditions are slightly used. It will still easily stand on edge. Although there is a slight scratch on its body, the golden imprint is still visible against the pink colored chip with four gray spots each side around the chip.

CONTINENTAL LAS VEGAS NEVADA CASINO POKER CHIP
For a price of only $7.00, one can purchase this lime green poker chip with a golden engrave of Continental Hotel Casino in the late 50s. What’s special about this chip? There is a polished detail around the chip which shows a flower, spade, heart and diamond.

Beanie Babies the Uncollectible

Maple, the Canadian Beanie BabyWhen you think about Beanie Babies do you think cute, sweet, playful, disappointing, clutter, or does anyone still think they are collectible? I bet there are people still collecting them. Still, running on the Beanie Baby high, sure that Beanie Babies will rise (in value) again.

The first Beanie Baby was marketed twenty years ago, 1993. Some young people won’t know what a Beanie Baby is. The Beanie Baby fervour died down in about 2000.

I only bought one Beanie Baby during the rush to collect them. I bought Maple, the Canadian Beanie Baby when they were offered at McDonald’s restaurants. Does anyone remember that? I was in the US, living on and off with Todd. It was before we were married in 2000. I remember Todd’s Aunts asking me to bring them Beanie Babies from Canada, when I went home again and was coming back. (I was doing a lot of border crossing in those days).  I hadn’t caught the Beanie Baby craze so finding time to get them and space to pack them was not a priority for me. But, his Aunt was a big collector.

Funny how I have bought two Beanie Babies since the days of the Beanie Baby crash but only that one during the rush to collect them. The two I bought since then were found in a thrift shop. I paid a quarter for one and the other came in a bag of toys sold for a dollar, just trying to get rid of excess toys in the shop.

The Beanie Baby has been brought low since the days of it’s huge popularity and the rush to collect them all. People collected hoards of Beanie Babies and now still have to deal with a hoard of Beanie Babies worth far less than they paid for them. Not quite worthless, they are still cute after all. They are still what they always were, a cute toy for children and adults who like something to cuddle. The Beanie Baby never changed, just our concept of them. It would be nice if collectors took this as a lesson. If people used more caution with their collecting, keeping it exclusive rather than hoarding and collecting ALL of them. But, people still get caught up too easily in the marketing, the need to have them all and the idea that they will make a lot of money when they sell them.

I do still have Maple, somewhere. The other one I bought was the St. Patrick’s Day Beanie Baby and it is somewhere too. Put away, not with the idea of selling them for big bucks later, just something nice to have around even though I don’t have the space to display them right now.

The Magic Of Polavision

I’ve been shopping for “lots” on eBay lately: sellers box up a bunch of low-end things, like cameras or 8mm movies, and then sells them as a set.  I’ve found I can get some pretty cheap fun stuff — plus, the mixed-bags aren’t always described very well, so sometimes you get a surprise.  In a lot of three movie cameras, I got this strange little beast:

It looks about the same size and vintage of Super8 cameras, and upon opening it up I can see it required a film cartridge.  However, the cartridge is too long and too thin to be Super8, or even a cartridge-loading 8mm roll-film camera.  The Polaroid logo on the front should have been my first clue — In the land of Land, Polaroids weren’t the kind of camera that used over-the-counter film formats.  This is a Polavision camera: Polaroid’s first and only foray into self-developing movie film.

Yes, that’s the part that blew my mind:  the magical Polaroid 600 film that everyone shakes like a Polaroid picture is awe-inspiring enough, so doing that at 20 or 30 frames a second blows my mind.  The film was, technically, 8mm film, but it wasn’t the same beast.   The film was pre-loaded in a cartridge, along with a reservoir of developing fluid.  The movie was filmed in a Polaroid camera, like any other normal home movie.   The specialized player did most of the work:  the first time a cartridge was played, the player released the developing fluid, and in 20 seconds the whole movie was ready to be watched.

Polaroid devoted enormous amounts of money and resources into producing these instant-watch films — compared to regular 8mm home movies, which could take days to get back — and when they released it to the market they expected these Polavision cameras to take off like hotcakes.

In 1950, maybe:  color silent movies were the standard of the day, and quick developing would be a big advantage.

In the 1960s,  Super8 film, with a larger frame and better sensitivity, was beginning to take over the market — but Polaroid might have still been able to hold their own.

The Polavision home movie system, unfortunately, debuted in 1977 — the same year the VHS tape broke into the United States market.   Betamax had been around since 1975.  Even Super8 got sound recording in the early 1970s.    The self-developing technology was an enormous breakthrough, but as a personal movie-maker it was about twenty years too late.

The image quality was too poor, even by the low-quality bar that VHS lived with well into the 1990s.  It could only shoot for two minutes at a time, and being locked in a cartridge means no splicing film together into longer movies.   The Polavision film had a very low ISO, so it only worked well in outdoor bright daylight.   The Polavision viewer that was crucial to the development of the film was inadequate for shared viewing, and wasn’t able to project on a large screen.  Pretty much the only advantage the Polavision system had was that magical quick developing, which made it only useful for speed, and not for, you know, enjoyment or artistic creativity.

The Polaroid company was already beginning to implode, even without this huge financial failure;  Land left the company in 1980, and the business struggled to hold on until 2001 when it was sold off to investors, and stopped producing instant film shortly thereafter.   The quick-developing technology didn’t die, though, at least not right away:  Polaroid upscaled the process and loaded into standard 35mm rolls, releasing it as the quick-developing Polachrome instant 35mm slide film.

Vintage Pin-Ups For The Nursery

Once upon a time, brightly-colored graphics on pressed layers of cardboard in the shape of characters from nursery rhymes, Mother Goose stories, and other childhood tales covered the walls in baby nurseries and children’s bedrooms.

Once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States joined World War II, Japanese imports disappeared from store shelves and American companies began to take over the toy and other markets once previously held by importers. At the end of the war, Phil Riley of the Dolly Toy Company in Tipp City, Ohio, designed this new kind of wall decoration. They were dubbed “Pin-Ups” and promptly patented.

The Pin-Ups hit stores in 1948, marking the entrance of Dolly Toy Co. into the “Baby Business”, and quickly spawning knock-offs. Dolly Toy would defend their patent in court — and win, thus cornering the paper Pin-Ups market. With such success behind them, Dolly Toy sought to increase their line. By the the 1950s, the company had created other matching décor items for baby’s room. Along with Tidee-Ups (a decorative wall hangers with pegs for clothing), there were lamps and even the company’s first Disney designs. By the early 1960s, crib mobiles would be sold too.

The following photos are of the Dolly Toy Co. items I have listed at Etsy. (You can also search eBay for deals too.)

I personally adore the vintage Western cowboy designs. I soooo wanted to do my son’s room in a vintage cowboy theme, but I didn’t have these then. I mentioned that to my son when he was about six years-old and he put his hand on my arm and said, “You can still do that it you want, Mom.” It just about broke my heart it was so sweet! Of course, now that he’s 11, all I get is an eyeball-roll. *sigh*

If some of these seem vaguely familiar or faintly nostalgic, even if you never had them in your family’s home, you may recall seeing them on reruns of at least one classic TV show.

According to the long-gone Dolly Toy website, Dolly Toy Co. products were featured on one of the most popular shows, I Love Lucy, thus making Pin-Ups part of The World’s Most Famous Nursery. While Dolly Toy Co. was not featured in the 1953 ad, you can spot the Pin-Ups in Desi Jr’s nursery — there’s Jack Jumping Over The Candlestick and what appears to be Mary & her Little Lamb.

A more complete Dolly Toy history (or corporate obituary, as the company ceased in 2008) can be found here.

Oh, The Places You Will Go!

On shows like American Pickers or Pickers Sisters, every once in a while the pickers go into some unassuming building and find themselves someplace surprising, a place where the outside doesn’t betray what’s inside. It might seem like TV magic, something that doesn’t happen in the real world, but my Wifey and I ran into our own “picker moment” recently.

Just after Christmas, Wifey was hanging out down at the antique mall. While she was chit-chatting with the manager, a guy came in looking to sell some things. His mother had moved into assisted living and he had been put in charge of liquidating the farm, so he was looking for a picker to come out and buy some stuff. Wifey said, sure, we’ll come out and take a look.

We bought a vanload from him the first time out, and he had said that some other time we should come back and see what’s in the barn. Now that’s what we’re talking about: the good stuff is always in The Barn, at least from our perspective. We had been polite and taken time to talk with him about his mom, his family, and how hard it is to clean out a house, and we let him know how much we thought the various items were worth or how old it was, even if we weren’t going to buy it. It turns out he had talked to another dealer first — that dealer had been brusque, bought a couple things and quickly left. Little did that dealer know he missed out on the offer of The Barn by not taking his time as a picker to be polite and get to know the seller first.

Due to weather and other conditions, we couldn’t get into the barn at that time. Finally, this past weekend, Wifey got a text from him, saying we should come out to the farm again. We thought it was about some other stuff we were interested in buying but he hadn’t made a decision, but we didn’t go in the house — he met us in the yard.

Turns out, he wanted to take us out to The Barn.

The snow was a little over a foot deep, but we had brought our boots, so we started to trudge across the farmyard out to the classic gambrel barn at the north end of the property. The first floor was your average barn fare – bicycle parts, old farm tools, a rusty bedspring, so we made a pile by the door. While we were climbing on the piles of abandoned treasures, picking through buckets of doorknobs and pipe fittings, our host had disappeared. When he returned, he said, “all the good stuff is upstairs.”

He led us around to the side of the barn where he had pried open a door. We had to climb over an old rusty drag to get onto a steep set of stairs. As we climbed, D gazed at all of the old rough-cut gambrel rafters and said, “wow, all this wood is very cool.” I was just ahead of her, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I said, “if you’re impressed with that, just wait until you get up here.”

The floor of the hayloft looks like it hadn’t ever seen a single piece of straw. At the far end of the loft was a stage. The stairs we came up were the back stairs; on the other side was the main stairs, straight and not as steep, but blocked from the outside. Long benches flanked each side of the wide-open space. Signs warned against leaning on the hayloft door and advised care walking on the stairs. This wasn’t a farmer’s barn: this was a barn dance barn.

It didn’t take long for us to put two and two together. In the first batch of stuff we bought from this farm, we found a matchbook advertising Ida Carlson’s Barn dance-hall. I knew there were a bunch of barn dance-halls in the area back in the day, so I figured Ida’s barn had to be pretty close to Fargo. Standing here, at the end of a polished hardwood floor in the upstairs of a barn, I was actually in Ida Carlson’s Barn.

Our host was Ida Carlson’s grandson, and after Ida retired from the dance hall business his parents kept it going until the 1980s. The heyday of Ida Carlson’s Barn was the 1930s to the 1940s. The barn was built in 1934, specifically to host dances; it — and the outhouse, of course — were the first buildings on the property. Ida got her permit to run barn dances in May 1934 and ads for events at the Barn started appearing in the Moorhead Daily News almost immediately. She applied for a beer license, too, but the county declined, saying having beer and barn dances in the same place “would be against the public interest.” Ida Carlson’s Barn became a popular youth hangout for all the usual reasons that young people needed a place out of town, away from their responsibilities, to hang out with other youths. It’s where people met their life-long spouses, and the NDSU Spectrum even joked that the closest that their female students “have ever been to a cow, probably, is at Ida Carlson’s barn dance.”

The barn hadn’t seen a dance in about thirty years; our host’s brother has a band, and it’s his equipment on the stage today. Before we even started to look at treasures to buy, we got more stories about Ida’s barn and a brief tour, including the wooden railing where fifty years of bands wrote their names on the boards. When we finished our picking, as we drove away from the farmstead, our conversation was more about Ida Carlson’s Barn than any of the things we bought.

A Vintage Mae West Scrapbook

Today’s scrapbooks are filled with photographs of family & friends, complimented by decorative papers and supplies purchased for the sole act of creating fantastic looking photo albums. But once upon a time, scrapbooks bore more resemblance to their name: they were books full of “scraps” of paper.

Some of these vintage scrapbooks did chronicle personal events or lifetimes, of course; but many were just compilations of neat things people found in newspapers and magazines. Some people were quite dedicated, focusing their efforts on specific themes. At least each scrapbook had its own theme. And some of the most popular themes were scrapbooks dedicated to movie stars. Like this old Mae West scrapbook.

It’s filled with carefully clipped images of the film star from various newspapers and magazines of the time. Looks like there are a few publicity photos sent to fans as well.

I know some people will balk at the seller’s price tag of $450. But when you consider how much it would cost to find and purchase enough vintage publications and the like to attempt to recreate this nearly-antique scrapbook, it seems a pretty small price to pay in comparison. Plus, even if you could manage to locate all the same scraps, would it be the same as knowing someone dedicated themselves to the selection and organization of this old book? I don’t think so.

When you think about it, scrapbooking isn’t much different than blogging is today. But as ephemeral as old paper is, there’s something more lasting about it… Perhaps because none of us knows what will become of blogs and websites in the next 80 years. Even in that unknown future, I can’t imagine someone not enjoying holding an old book like this and carefully turning the pages to see what someone created.

Image Credits: All images from empressjadeoftheuniverse.

Vintage Tin Lithographed Popeye Pail

In this vintage photo, two children play with water and a tin lithographed pail. You can see Swee’Pea and Olive Oyl from Popeye The Sailor Man.

This is the vintage pail in color, along with some other vintage Popeye sand toys.

The photo was found in a 1956 magazine from Sweden, confirming that this was likely a European-made tin litho sand or water toy.

Children & Animal Stars Lost To Film Collectors

In the December 1972 issue of Films in Review, in the regular Films on 8 & 16 column, Samuel A. Peeples laments what is available on film.

I am struck by the current lack of public acceptance of certain kinds of screen entertainment, most notably short subjects, newsreels, and child and animal stars. Television is blamed for the decline in the first two, and the greater sophistication of today’s young people for the last two.

Very few of the old films featuring animal stars have survived. The private film collector can purchase a few 8mm prints starring Rin Tin Tin, and a couple of Westerns featuring his marvelous pony, Fritz, and even a complete print of Rex, King of Wild Horses; occasionally the collector can find prints of 16mm sound features starring various cowboys and “their” horse and/or dog co-stars. But that’s about all, and even the currently popular “retrospective” programs of films of the past have yet to bring back any of the fondly remembered great animal stars.

Like every other kid who was around during the last years of the silents, I loved animal pictures.

I think you can see where Peeples is going. Similar feeling film fans can click to read the larger scans.

Images sent in by Jaynie of Here’s Looking Like You, Kid. Jaynie has shared more from this issue; see The Lovely Nazimova.

A Sucker For Valentines

These vintage Valentine’s Day cards are also holders for lolly pops or suckers. The half-circle tabs pop-up, and the stem of the sucker would be slid through the openings, thus delivering an extra sweet greeting — with pop related puns, of course!

Produced by the E. Rosen Company of Providence, RI, these vintage die-cut cards measure approximately six inches tall and are printed on cardboard stock as opposed to thin paper.

(These cards, 1930s and 1940s, are from my own collection; but you can find cards for sale here.)

This pair of traffic signal cops or police officers shows that the one with green ink is older than the black ink; the one with green states that the patent is pending.

These cards were part of a long tradition of delivering holiday candies. E. Rosen Co., which also operated as School House Candy, is also noted for the highly collectible figural plastic candy holders, such as Easter bunnies, Santas, witches, and Valentines hearts. Those plastic pieces are marked Rosbro, a sister (or brother) company of Rosen as both companies were owned by the same family.

E. Rosen Co. was acquired by Sherwood Brands in 1998; Sherwood went into receivership and among the assets auctioned-off in 2012 were intellectual property rights, including Rosen names.

Sails All Set For Vintage Valentines

One of the things I like best about vintage Valentine’s Day cards, especially the children’s cards, are the puns. (It bears repeating!) The other thing I like about vintage Valentines are the graphics. So much nicer to look at than today’s pop culture Valentines, I think. …Then again, today’s stars and fads will become the nostalgia of the future. But then that just means I still have time to change my feelings about them.

This vintage Valentine combines both puns and great graphics — with a few other goodies we don’t see today. This vintage Valentine greeting card featuring a little boy sailing as the captain of his ship is slightly embossed, die cut, and has a stand on the back so it can be displayed.

The best thing about it though is that both the bottom of the card and the stand are rounded, so when the card is standing up, it rocks and rolls, like the motion of the sea!

I can’t keep all the lovely vintage Valentine’s Day cards (or anything else I get my hands on), so I’ve listed it and others for sale. Sometimes, scanning and blogging about things is enough time to cherish something before letting it go to another collector. Hopefully one who won’t have to keep things stored, but can display it and let it be adored.

I am a Shark Collector

In my own way, I am a shark collector.

I don’t keep stuffed sharks, whether real sharks or cotton stuffed. I don’t really have much at all to show for my shark collection. Not any more at least.

It still bugs me that my brother threw away the shark book I had been given for a long ago birthday. The book was published in 1976, full of paintings of sharks done by Richard Ellis.

I’d been thinking about the book this week, but I couldn’t remember the name of the book or the painter/ author. So I began digging online. I found it.

My Mother thought it was weird to have an interest in sharks, a predatory animal from the ocean. She tried to talk to me about it and talk me out of it. I knew I didn’t have a weird interest. I’m not planning to swimming with sharks, I don’t think about trying to make friends or pet sharks or hunt them or anything else really. I like to look at the sharks, in the photographs and paintings.

I think I like their sleek lines against the backdrop of the ocean. The ocean Richard Ellis paints is quiet, sparkling and bouncing with light hitting the water and the smooth looking shark coasting through the water. I also like the photos of sharks in the waves and crashing ocean. Yes, we know they are dangerous, but there’s more to them. They are a quiet, skilled predator, at home in their universe.

Have you had a book which sticks in your mind due to the loss of the book? Is it worthwhile buying the book again, even if it isn’t about collecting it as much as being able to see and read it again?

I thought about getting another copy of the book. But, it seems unfair when I did have one. So, I decided to leave it. A book unopened, sort of. However, if I see the book somewhere else, like a thrift store, I might get it. This is an emotional decision rather than anything base on logic. Don’t judge me, as they say when they know they have given the appearance of being loopy.

So, at the moment, my shark collection is all online. Available to be shared with anyone who follows the link on Snip.it. (Note: Snip.it closed their service).

Taylor, Smith & Taylor “Ever Yours” China

The “Ever Yours” invitation set by Taylor, Smith & Taylor Co. (TS&T) of Ohio, a 53-piece service for eight, including 10 hostess pieces.

Your choice of nine patterns by designer John Gilkes… all over-proof, dishwasher-proof, detergent-proof.

Made by the makers of Taylorton, Modern American Casual China.

Vintage ad found in the May 1961 issue of Good Housekeeping.

You can find out more about TS&T and John Gilkes here.