THE UNEXPECTED COLLECTIONS: PICK & GRIN FIND AT HOME

Grin: I decided to clean out some desk drawers and filing cabinets. Trash collection is tomorrow and I can’t seem to close some of my drawers anymore.

Pick: You never could keep your drawers closed.

Grin: I resemble that remark, and blame you for my condition. But to the point, I have trashed some stuff I know should have gone to recycle years ago, mostly paper receipts, bills, catalogs and correspondence. Lots of old price lists, that makes me cringe when I think of the great stuff I should have bought at those prices.

Pick: Was that back when you were making two bucks an hour, and all the fries you could eat?

Grin: OK!! Ruin a dream, but you were the one that married me for my money.

Pick: I married you because your mother promised to pay off your bar tab.

Grin: And your father offered me fifty bucks and a tank of gas if I wanted to escape.

Pick: So, what’s the problem, do you need help carrying your junk to the curb?

Grin: What I really need is a sanity check, I have found stuff. Things that have accumulated into what can only be described as unexpected collections. And since you are an expert on collections, I need your advice on whether to toss them out, or save them with the intent of someday offering them for sale.

Pick: Well, if they’re your collections, some items are probably antique already.

Grin: I should have taken the fifty bucks.

Pick: So let’s see what can be tossed or saved.

The collection of business cards, mostly industrial companies from the upper mid west, lots of big name companies, many manufacturers now gone or moved.

Our old expired credit cards.

Plastic and heavy paper faux credit cards pasted on letters telling me my credit was so good I needed another card.

Pick: Goes to show, you can fool some of the banks all the time and all of the banks some of the time.

Rubber stampers, mostly shipping room types, some are address or date stamps.

Old industrial catalogs, some dating back to the 1920s.

Connection cables from computers and electronic devices.

Pick: Well, let’s analyze each to see their potential for a future sale, with the understanding you’re going to toss out the useless collections. First, your collection of fake credit cards, that’s an easy toss. You have so many the same and all from big companies, the collection will never be sellable in your lifetime. I’ll bet these were send out by the billions.

On the expired credit cards, I just don’t like having our name out there on old cards. This one is a tough decision as I have sold old credit cards before, but like the fake ones, none of yours are from old, out of business companies like Gimbels Department Store, a bank or an oil company thats no longer in business. Those would be worth hanging on to.

As for old electrical cables, why not save one of each style and recycle any duplication of the ones that are from old technology.

The rubber stampers, ink and pads are strictly useable, none are old enough to call collectable but still useable.  Keep any that can be used for our antique business and sell or donate the rest.  I would think with the stamping craze still strong, some might be sellable, like the fragile or first class stamps.

I have been surprised at the number of ephemera collectors we have encountered, look at our recent sales on Ebay, especially luggage labels, industrial catalogs, industrial employee magazines and bus passes. I would suggest any of those items are worth saving, as long as they’re older than 1980..

Grin: That’s pretty new. I have socks older than that.

Pick: 1980 is thirty years ago. That’s not the only thing in your drawers that’s old.

Caring For Your Vintage Lingerie

Where else can you find the best tips about caring for your vintage fashions and foundation garments then from vintage women’s publications? Then, as now, magazines shared tips for female readers interested in stretching their fashion dollars by not stretching their garments out of shape.

Inside a 1941 issue of Modern Woman Magazine, tips on how to launder your girdles:

And in another issue of that magazine, circa 19445, tips on caring for foundation garments for New Look fashions to preserve the their fit:

Slowing Down To Look At Vintage Hot Rod Ephemera

I know next to nothing about hot rods, dragsters, automobilia or even cars in general, but I do recognize the value of vintage car part catalogs, like these Almquist “Equipment of Champions” catalogs, to fans and collectors of such things.

And I’ll admit, looking at old hot rod custom sport bodies, kits, 3-D chrome emblems, classic flame decals, etc. is cool — even when it’s all in black and white. (If you think so too, click the images to see large scans.)

But after taking some time to page through the pair of catalogs from Almquist Engineering Co., Inc. of Milford, PA (founded by Ed Almquist), I decided I had to list them for sale (1959 catalog, 1960 catalog) for collectors in need. (And if you collect, you know it’s a need — you need to know what was made and when, the part’s official name and/or stock number, etc.)

However I won’t be selling what I found inside one of the vintage catalogs — sketches of what I presume, my dear Watson, to be flame-type designs for the former owner’s dream car.

I won’t be selling them because they have no monetary value: A) the former owner doesn’t appear to have any fame, 2) most collectors or fans of hot rods probably have their own similar drawings, and III) fans of such finds typically won’t pay for such things — they prefer to enjoy the serendipity of their own finds.

I myself fall into the third category, and so will enjoy holding onto the vintage drawings, ever wondering if the maker of these drawings got his dream hot rod… If so, after sketching did he realized “flames” were more difficult than the thought, and so he just purchased them, or paid for a custom paint job… Or if he still pines for the awesome hot rod of his fantasies.

1957: The Year In Typewriters

I continue to be delighted with vintage magazines, this time another article in that November 1957 issue of Good Housekeeping has me thinking how advice on buying typewriters from 1957 might be of use to the collectors of typewriters today.

According to The Latest Word On Buying Typewriters, 1957 was a (at least semi) pivotal year for typewriters:

If you’re one of the many thousands of people who haven’t bought a typewriter in years, you’re in for some surprises.

Some of the gadgets offered on modern machines include easy-do ribbon changers, concave keys for finger comfort, automatic devices that show the number of type lines or inches remaining on the page, top plates that spring open at the touch of a button (to facilitate inside cleaning jobs), settings for light and for heavy touch, half-spacing to correct letter omissions or spacing errors, knobs to adjust the carriage speed to your own typing speed, special paper supports for post cards, practically noiseless type bars, and improved push-button settings for margins and tabulator. Often you can get typewriters to match the decor of your room, in pastels ranging from turquoise-blue to pink. You can usually choose a type style and size to match your whim, too; one manufacturer lists six sizes and 25 different kinds of type faces available in his portables.

Reading of yesteryear’s tech gadgets is both amusing and charming — like this part, explaining the “development of electrics” in typewriters:

In an electric typewriter — which is plugged into a wall outlet like any home appliance — the type bars, carriage return, and operational parts are moved by electrical power rather than by “finger power.” The typist mere touches the keys lightly, and electricity does the rest, the action resulting in a uniformly typed page.

How quaint the need for explaining an electric typewriter seems to this internet addict!

Such information may be charmingly amusing, yes; but this article may also help collectors identify the age of vintage typewriters too. So feel free to click the image to read (or download) a larger scan.

Tips On Identifying 10 Vintage & Antique Chests

In many ways, magazines haven’t changed much — but that just means that a lot of the information in vintage magazines remains as valuable as it once was. Today’s example comes from the November 1957 issue of Good Housekeeping; it’s an article on “How to Recognize 10 Chests.”

The article gives tips on identifying 10 basic styles of antique and vintage bureaus by noting the specific marks in style, finish and ornamentation of each. The 10 basic styles of chests in this article are:

French Provincial chest
Captain’s military chest
French Empire chest
Hepplewhite chest
Chippendale chest
Early American chest
Victorian chest
Louis XV chest or commode
Sheraton chest
Contemporary chest (circa 1950’s, of course!)

(Click the image for a large, readable, scan.)

If you’re interested, I’ve also “digitally clipped” the following from the same issue:

A fun look at The Date Line: Facts & Fancies for the Girl in School, by Jan Landon.

A disappointing look at Jobs for Women in the FBI.

Categorizing & Organizing Collectibles: The Quandry Of Ephemera

Photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward’s post has me thinking… He writes:

The biggest worry in my mind these days as I toss and turn in bed the waning days of the year has been what to do with 13, four-drawer metal filing cabinets full of my life’s work in the form of negatives, slides, transparencies and prints. I can be objective enough about my own output to know that they are worth money. But to whom and when? Probably when I am dead someone will have a peak and realize what I know now, and that is that I have a diverse treasure of Vancouver’s everyday life since I arrived in 1975.

After some discussion of books on categorization, he gets to the crux of the problem:

This all made me think of my own personal classification which is not really cross-referenced and installed into some sort of computer program. My filing system is alphabetical and depends on my memory alone. If I forget a person’s name I cannot find the file.

This is my problem. Organizing collections can be challenging, but it seems worst with ephemera. At least for me it is. Unlike pottery or glassware, figurines or even books, ephemera is not so readily displayable. At least not in the quantities I have it in.

I don’t even have an alphabetical system; all my vintage magazines, antique photographs, old postcards, etc., are lucky if they are lumped together by those simple categories.

alex-waterhouse-hayward-readsI’m not a bad collector or a lazy collector; I’m an overwhelmed and confused collector.

I’ve pondered, many times, about organizing my ephemera. You’d think vintage magazines at least would be easy: sort and store them by publication title, placed in chronological order. But you see, I don’t look for articles, images, or whatnot by “May, 1958, Cosmopolitan Magazine.” My continuing fascination, inspiration and delight in collecting vintage magazines due to the serendipity of going through each issue, page by page, and making discoveries. It would be nice to be able to, after making such discoveries, organize each issue by some sort of theme… “Advertisements,” “women’s history,” “humor,” etc., so that I could find them again. But any magazine, then as now, has so many themes. How would I know that the magazine I filed under “humorous ads from the 1950s,” would also contain a great feature on “women’s sexuality in the 1950s,” and a dozen other categories?

And this doesn’t even cover such things as antique postcards, vintage photographs, old booklets & receipts… *sigh*

While Alex’s post provides more food for thought, I don’t have any real answers yet. I won’t stop tossing and turning at night — or collecting by day — until I do. So I’d love to hear from other collectors about how you’ve organized and/or categorized your ephemera.

Photo credits: Photo of a young Alex reading from Alexwaterhousehayward.com.

Display, Protect, & Store Ephemera

What I like about these Lil Davinci Art Cabinets is the fact that each cabinet is a storage container as well as a display piece, holding up to 50 sheets at a time with a spring-loaded pocket.

That means you can store multiple pieces of artwork — and ephemera — in one place, with the one in front on display. The hinged door opens from the front, giving you easy access for rotating what’s seen as well as keeping other pieces within reach.

I’m thinking they’d work wonderfully for protectively displaying vintage magazines!

The art cabinets come in two sizes: The Li’L DaVinci (8.5″W x 11″H) and the Big DaVinci (12″W x 18″H).