Beautiful Antiques & Vintage Pieces You Will Love to Collect!

I am so excited. I have been waiting for this moment. I've gotten some really great things and some of the best hauls of my career lately. And now I get to share them with you because we are listing 20 items on eBay right now. And it's a big wide variety. Fun things, interesting things. We're going to take a deeper dive and let's have fun. This is mercury glass. It is silver. It is reflective. It is shiny. It is beautiful. It has a mirror-like finish. And if you're lucky, it's got a good plug on the bottom. In the 15th century in Venice, they made mirrors using actual mercury. Now mercury is a very dangerous material to work with. It also was a big trade secret. And so you were forbidden to leave the island of Murano, once the secret was told to you, under penalty of death. Now a few hundred years later, in 1849, an English scientist came up with the idea of using silver nitrate instead. They were experimenting with silver nitrate to develop photography. And they caught on to the idea that they could coat glass with silver nitrate instead of mercury, which made it a lot less nasty to work with and created really beautiful double-walled glass. And that's why this plug in the bottom is so important. Because if the seal goes, you will start to have the silver nitrate discolor. So you see a lot of old mercury glass that has specks in it. But this one is really perfect. It's in amazing condition. This one is bohemian. The heyday of this kind of mercury glass was between 1850 and 1880. Because Victorians in the mid-Victorian period wanted lots of reflective things so that they had lots of light shining around the room. Well, then electricity came along and suddenly the fad was over because you didn't need shiny silver surfaces. You actually had overhead lighting that was strong. And you could see all the colors in a room without having to bounce the light around. So mercury glass had about a 30-year heyday. And it's hard to find in good condition now. This one is really in nice shape. It has the enameling. And this is how we know it's bohemian. It's very similar to what the people erroneously call Bristol glass, decorated in enameling of that era. But this one's in terrific shape. The silver is all good, and the paint is all good. This one's 12 inches tall. We're starting it out at $39. We have a buyout now of $79. The prices on mercury glass right now are pretty good. I think that's rather affordable if you like this style for your decor. And it is really sharp looking. And so we're going to drop this on eBay now. You can click the links below and see how these things are doing. And if you're interested, make a bid. It's really fun to be showing some things that have vintage appeal but are actually true antiques. And this next one falls into that category too. This is the Halls Excelsior Bank. And the Halls Bank was done by J. and E. Stevens around 1870. That was a company that started out making tools and hardware, and they ended up making a line of cap guns. And they were so popular that they quit making the tools and hardware at their Connecticut factory, and they started making toys. And mechanical banks were a big deal in the 1860s and 70s because they did fun things like this. This little guy pops up. He is actually carved of wood, which was a little different. Generally, these are all cast iron, but the head is wooden. And so the fact that he's in really good shape with all his paint is kind of a miracle because you'd put your coin here, and then it would drop in. And then you had to actually take a screwdriver to get it out. This one's in really good shape. There's a little bit of paint loss on the back here and a few little chips on the high points. But in overall condition, it is really great. It is not missing anything. It's not rusted. The little guy is in really good condition, and that is the piece that is generally not in good condition. Mechanical banks are a pretty big deal with collectors and have been for a long time, especially this original era. They were designed because they thought if we made it fun, children will start to learn thrift. They'll want to save their coins because they get to have a little fun every time they drop a coin in the bank. And pretty soon adults were having fun too. One of the most famous ones is Tamimi Hall, which is a likeness of William Tweed, the New York Democratic councilman who was arrested in 1873 and convicted of embezzlement. That bank actually has a hand and it puts the coin in the guy's pocket. So mechanical banks were appealing to adults and children, and they definitely appeal to today's collectors. We're typically sell anywhere from 150 to several hundred, and it really just depends who sees it because the thing that is good about this one is the paint is good and the figure is good. One with a damaged figure sold recently for about $135. So this is a fun piece and we're gonna see where it goes now. This is so beautiful I wanted to show it next. This is RS Prescia. And RS Prescia is wonderfully made porcelain and its heyday was the Art Nouveau period. Schlegelmilch, along with a couple of his sons who had successor factories, started his factory in the late Victorian era. But it wasn't really popular in the United States until 1894 when we finally made tariff agreements where we lowered tariffs with other countries. Germany took more of our products and we took more of theirs. And that's when finally RS Prescia was able to get a New York firm to be their importer. Of course, part of the arrangement was they had to have the country of origin on the back. Well at that time, Prescia was still a royal section inside the country of Germany. Germany really didn't form from all of its kingdoms and its feudal state until the 1800s. They were a little behind the rest of Europe in that way. So the RS Prescia mark is what we look for. And this mark was used through about 1910. This is such a pretty line of porcelain. They did lots of various molds. They did all sorts of things that were Art Nouveau. This one has lotus flowers on the edge. It is a combination of hand painting and decalcomania, as they called it, which is transferware. And they had just figured out, thanks to chromolithography, how to get really, really beautiful, vibrant colors in the transfer decals. So instead of having to hand paint, if you wanted multicolored ware, well now they could do it using decalcomania. This is a nice example. These used to sell for about three times what they sell now. There were reproductions in the 1980s and 90s. And if you look at the reproductions, they do not have the proper mark. So you won't be fooled. They're also not as light and as translucent as RS Prescia is if you hold it to light. And so all you have to do is feel a few of the old pieces to know the difference. But it really scared off collectors for a while. And because of that, the prices came way down. Now these beautiful porcelains like this one will probably sell somewhere in the $60 range. We are starting it out at just $9.99. So we are wanting to send this to a home, either with a current collector of RS Prescia, or a new collector who recognizes the beauty in these things. Our next item is very small, but very cute, and very colorful, and absolutely vintage. These came from a gentleman who worked in NBC Studios in California. And this logo with the peacock first came out in 1956. And that was because they started recording in color for television for the first time. Now the peacock was not the main logo of NBC until 1979. But these are definitely earlier because they have the 11 different feathers, and each one has a teardrop above it with a color in it. And this is called the Laramie peacock because the first show that they used this logo on was Laramie, a western show in 1962. This was used until 1975, and then retired. So we know that these cufflinks are from sometime in the early 1970s. But it's always important to make sure that when you move the bar, that it moves easily, and will snap into place and stay in place, which these do very well. And that way they won't fall off your French cuff shirt. There you see the back, and it has the NBC logo in it. That is the snake logo. And that was retired along with the Laramie peacock at the end of 1975. They switched to the blue and red and logo. NBC was lagging in the ratings at that time, and thought if they modernized the way that they presented themselves, that that would somehow help viewership. It didn't really work. Saturday Night Live, which was a new show on NBC in 1975, famously made fun of them for that. But they do get credit for the expression in living color, which is how they started announcing Laramie and other shows through the 1970s. So these are really fun, and I love the fact that they actually came from NBC studios. We're starting them at just $9.99. We have a buy it now of $24 on them, and that might be a deal. But we will see if there's somebody out there who just loves this design or has a particular affinity for television history who finds these interesting. Well, it is always good for one to be prepared, and I learned that when I was a Boy Scout. And so apparently did the original owner of this. This one, if you look at the color, is a brownish color. And if you look at some of the pins and the things on it that go beyond just the regular Boy Scout stuff, like this patriotic shield or this pin from the Department of Defense, you will notice that this is a 1940s Boy Scout sash. That's getting back in time fairly early. The Boy Scouts started in 1907, when Robert Baden Powell started the organization. And by 1910, there was definitely a sense that with more urbanization and a lot of immigrants moving to the United States, there needed to be some organization to encourage young men to embrace patriotism and self-sufficiency, because the perception was that those qualities were being lost. And people in the progressive era were very concerned about that and the fate of the country if that happened. And Teddy Roosevelt, in particular, was a big proponent of the Boy Scouts when they started in 1910 in the United States. The collectability of these older pieces has to do in part with the merit badges and some of the rank badges that are on them. You can tell this person got up to being a Star Scout because they have the star logo with the loop underneath. They also have some of the pins, including the Be Prepared, which is second class, and then some of the higher end ranks, and then they have merit badges. And we know these merit badges are type C, which is 1936 to 1946, because they are the color they are and they have a very narrow band. And so there's merit badges for cooking, for fire keeping, for first aid, for public safety, and other pins and badges that make it interesting, including the Boy Scout pin. And this is from Santa Monica, California. You see the CSS on the bottom, which I'm not sure what that means. I think that may prove to be interesting to somebody who's a scouting collector. These older pieces from the 40s, 50s, and before are really where the collecting in Boy Scouts is the strongest. Scouting has changed a lot in recent years, and part of that has to do with the fact that fewer people are sending their kids into Boy Scouts. But when I was a kid, most of the people I knew were in Boy Scouts, and I certainly was. I loved the hiking. I only got to first class because I could not tie knots to save my life. A piece like this, especially with the service C Scout pin here, could potentially go for as much as $150. We're going to start it at a third of that at $49.99, and we will see who has nostalgia for scouting these days. Next up is I'm really excited about because I'd never had anything by this company before. These are Kenton Hills porcelain. It has a nice logo on it that you'll see right there. You don't see much of Kenton Hills because it was a very short-lived story right before the onset of the Second World War. Harold Bopp was a ceramic engineer who worked for Rookwood. He started there in 1929. He watched the firm slowly get more and more weak in the marketplace through the Depression. He could tell they were heading for bankruptcy, and he went to the management and said, we need to start making things and wholesaling them to major department stores to stay in business. Well, the company had always been very focused on artware, and they didn't want to do that. And so he quit, and he took a number of the Rookwood staff with him across the river to Erlanger, Kentucky, right across from Cincinnati where Rookwood was made, and he started Kenton Hills. They designed a whole lot of molded pieces that definitely have a similarity in kinship to the Rookwood molded pieces of the same era. He went to Gump's department store, Tiffany's, Neiman Marcus, and he offered to sell them these pieces at wholesale, and they said yes. So he was on the right track. Meanwhile, by 1941, Rookwood had filed for bankruptcy. Kenton Hills, on the other hand, got a lot of orders their first year. They ultimately made between 10,000 and 15,000 pieces, which is not a lot, but they were only in business for about two, two and a half years because the Second World War started. And all of a sudden, a lot of the chemicals that were needed for the glazes and the other materials they needed were in short supply because of war restrictions. And because they were a new company, they didn't have a backlog of material to work with. And so Harold Bopp saw that the company was going to peter out because of lack of resources, and he took a job with Corning. But in those short few years, they did really wonderful pieces that are really well molded, just like the Rookwood pieces that they had made across the river. Look at the detail in the turtles, and the color is fun. He's climbing a rock. There is just so much to this. It's nice that these have the original labels. They also have a mark on the bottom that is a little bit different. So if you find them without the labels, you might not recognize them if you don't see this mark. They have a stock number, the company logo, and then the JB, which is the designer involved. These have been weighted. They poured some sort of a filler in here so that they would be used as bookends because, of course, they were made for that. In the process of doing that, one of them internally developed an ever so small spider crack right in that flat area that you see. And it's so small that now I'm having trouble seeing it, but I just want to disclose that because Kenton Hills never sold any of their seconds. They destroyed them, and so the fact that this has a small flaw is something that was done at the end of the manufacturing process or afterwards by somebody who decided to put weight in them. It does not seem to have affected it, and it's barely noticeable as you see. And so these should sell for a pretty good price because you just don't see very much by this company. And the people who collect Rickwood are very interested in this because it is an offspring of their favorite pottery. And the people who collect Kenton Hills, including the Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, are interested in getting more pieces because it just doesn't come up. In all the years I've been doing this, this is the first time I've ever owned anything by them, and maybe only the second time I've ever seen anything by them. So it's scarce. It's interesting. It's a good part of pottery history. We are starting them at just $79. I'm not putting a buy it now on these because they come up so scarcely. I don't really know what the potential is. I know they were Rickwood, they might go for $200 or more. So we're going to find out now. Some of you lucky folks who have leisure time get to travel by railroad, and it is a fun way to travel, especially if you can get a sleeper car these days, because railroad travel obviously went away mainly because airline travel was so much faster. This is from back in the heyday of railroad travel. This is a New York Central small rectangular tray, as they call it. It's about nine inches. That logo in the center is the DeWitt Clinton. That was the first steam engine in New York, the fourth steam engine in the United States in 1831. And so the New York Central, which descended from those lines, wanted to commemorate that for its centennial. So in 1925, in anticipation of that, they contracted with Buffalo China and Syracuse China and had these pieces made. This one is a Buffalo China mark. You see the New York Central lines. It's in really great shape. No scratches. It looks like it was barely used. It must have been at the bottom of the pile, or it was one that was made near the end of production. This pattern was made from 1925 to 1951 and then replaced with things that were more modernist at that time. The New York Central Railroad was a major important railroad for many years, for over a century. This would have served on their main lines between New York and Chicago, St. Louis and Boston. And that was where a lot of the passenger traffic in the United States was at that time. In fact, the New York-Boston route is one of the few that is still highly profitable for passenger railroading. The loss of passenger traffic really decimated a lot of the major railroads in this country, particularly on the east coast where passenger traffic was a bigger part of their business because everybody lived so close and fewer people drove. And then the arrival of the interstate highway system meant that trucking was competing with railroads in a way it never had. The railroads really were down on their luck. And so in 1968, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad merged to become the Penn Central Railway. And three years later, they collapsed in the greatest bankruptcy in American corporate history up to that time. It was a very bitter end to a very storied railroad. And so the railroad china and the other ephemera from that are nostalgic to people who either remember those days or enjoy model railroading, or just like good quality china. Because this cafe ware, it's really well made. It's very heavy, it's very substantial. I know a lot of people who have children or grandchildren collect this because they're not afraid to use it around their kids because you can drop it on the floor and the chances are it probably won't break. So we're going to put this one out at just $9.99. I suspect it will sell for about five times that. But I haven't seen one of these pieces offered at auction for quite a while, so we will see where it goes. In wartime, the government does crazy things because they panic. And one of the crazy things they did at the end of the Civil War was to give Nevada statehood, and that was in 1864. No offense to you Nevadans, it all worked out great. We're glad to have you. But in 1864, fewer than 40,000 people lived in Nevada, which was below the threshold that was required to get statehood. But it was a week before the 1864 election, and Abraham Lincoln was concerned that he might not get re-elected, and he needed every vote that he could get. So they gave Nevada statehood really about 40 years before it should have qualified. And part of the reason was because they had silver. And the government then authorized that a mint be built near the Comstock Lode, which was the greatest silver strike in American history at that time. Now the Carson City mint, it didn't make its first coins until 1870, because the Civil War took all the money out of the economy. But here is a Morgan dollar from 1878, the first year of the Morgan dollar, and below that wreath you will see the letters CC for Carson City. And Carson City dollars typically were the smallest mintages and are the scarcest and most desirable to collectors now. They only minted coins in Carson City until 1893, and in the panic of 1893 the mintages were so low they decided it didn't make sense to keep the mint open anymore, especially because they had mints in San Francisco where they could take the silver by rail. So they shut down the mint and it eventually became the Nevada State Museum at Carson City. The Morgan dollar is a beautiful coin and perhaps the most quintessential coin of American coinage for collectors. It's the one you see depicted on the most coin books and it has the wonderful eagle on the back. This is in what they call very fine condition. Condition has to do with how much wear there is, and value has to do with how much wear there is relative to the scarcity of the piece. This one you can see the feathers pretty well in the chest and in the wings. They're a little bit flattened from wear. On the front you can read Liberty well, and you can see her hair ornament as well as the detail in the hair. So this is what they call very fine condition. It means it was circulated. It means it's not perfect, but it means it's a lot better than average. And because of that, this is a fairly valuable coin. Now in honor of the craziness of the Carson City mint having ever existed, I'm going to do something crazy and put this out at just $9.99. And why would I do that? Well, coins are the most fluid market, the most widely collected thing amongst all collectibles in every category. And because of that, and because it has intrinsic value for silver, we know there will be bidders on this. It is pretty much a guarantee that you will sell a coin if you put it on eBay and you list it accurately and fairly, and it's a nice older American coin. And so this one should sell for somewhere in the $140 to $175 range. So I am not worried about putting it out at $9.99 because I think it'll bid right up, and we're gonna find out now. Well, from coins to jewelry we go, but this is not a piece of jewelry. It is a pocket mirror from a jewelry store. This is from the F. J. Murphy Jewelers and Opticians, which is what they were called originally when they started in 1913 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. This jewelry store is still in business in its original location, and I am going to let them know that this is out there on eBay. I thought about just contacting them directly with this, but I realized that they might already have this in their collection. This was done in 1919 as a memorial for the gentleman in the statue there, and that gentleman was John Mitchell. John Mitchell was the head of the United Mine Laborers Association. He was involved in a 1902 strike that ended up being mediated by Theodore Roosevelt and ended up resulting in much better conditions for miners and laborers, because mining was a very difficult job and a very low-paying job at that time. And Pottsville was right in the middle of the coal industry, so since this gentleman helped their customers end up being able to afford jewelry, they figured that they would lionize him by putting him on this pocket mirror. And as you see, it's in really wonderful condition. No damage to the mirror. A few fingerprints from where I've been handling it will take care of that. The colors are good. This is done in celluloid, wrapped around, and it is nice and clean. Great colors. If Pottsville seems familiar to you and you can't quite place why, well, you may be someone who is a fan of Yangling Beer, which is the second largest American-owned brewery at this point, and it's been in Pottsville since the 1800s. We're going to start this out at $9.99 and let people have fun and find out what the value is. I grew up in Bremerton, Washington, a Navy town, and that is where I got this piece. And it is also one of the places the Great White Fleet came in 1908. And this is a wonderful piece that represents that voyage. The Great White Fleet was the upgrade of the Navy that started in the 1880s and culminated in the U.S. having the largest naval fleet in the world for the first time. And the purpose of the Great White Fleet sailing around the world was a goodwill gesture, but also to project American power, because this was shortly after we had taken over possessions in Guam, the Philippines, and other islands around the Pacific and the Caribbean. And we were definitely sending a message, as Theodore Roosevelt liked to say, of walking softly and carrying a big stick. And the Great White Fleet was a demonstration of the big stick. This piece is a really beautiful remembrance of that event. It is a celluloid picture album. This is the hasp. The hasp is in really good shape. This would have been made to hold cabinet cards, which were these photos on cardboard. And there are a number of the photos still in it, and the condition is good on the interior as well. And that really is important. And some of the pictures are really fun. Most of them are just stills of people, but I love this one with the accordion player and the fellow who looks like he's about to dance a jig. There's one page that's a little bit wrinkled. I think they took cards out of there. I am not going to do anything to fix that, because I figured the new owner who probably will collect cabinet cards will want to put them in, and I will let them do it in a way that is satisfactory. The cards should flatten that out. The important thing is that there's no rips or tears. There's nothing loose or missing. The felt has aged. It's darkened, but it's still in pretty good condition overall. The only thing that is not in original working order is that this was originally a music box, which is really unusual with these. And the music box is there, and it shows the songs it plays, but the music box is a little bit overwhelmed, because somebody didn't obey the notice that said turn slowly and not too tight. But I figure I'm going to leave it as it is. The important thing is that the cover is in perfect condition. It doesn't have any cracks or chips. The corners are good. The corners were reinforced with metal, which these often were not. And this was a presentation piece to sit in the middle of your table, so you could open it up and show all of your photos to your guests. It's just a wonderful thing. I've never seen one with the ship on it before. I have to think that these are pretty scarce, because the Great White Fleet only stopped in New York, the Bremerton area, and San Francisco in the United States. All of its other stops were abroad. It went to New Zealand, and Australia, and Japan. Japan in particular was controversial because the Japanese fleet had just defeated the Russian fleet in the Japo-Russian war, and we made a point of going to Yokohama to show them, ours is bigger than yours. It went all over the world through the Suez Canal to Gibraltar, but it only went to three American cities. So these just are not commonly seen, and I think it's a really good one. I am going to put it out at $99, because it's valuable enough, and frankly, I gave enough for it, that if it doesn't sell online, I'll happily keep it and will sell it to somebody at one of our shows, because this is an unusual piece. But not everything we put on eBay has to be expensive to be fun and interesting. Sometimes I just like to put nostalgia items that people like me remember from our childhood, and here's one now. I knew so many people when I was in school who had the pencil sharpener with Snoopy on the doghouse from Peanuts, and it was made of fabulous plastic in Hong Kong around 1970. There's where your pencil went. A lot of these Snoopy got snapped off the top. It was always strange that Snoopy sat on top of the doghouse, but Charles Schultz said that the reason for the Snoopy character was he figured dogs had a pretty boring life, but he could express this whole fantasy life in the dog's head, and that that mirrored his own fantasy life, because all of the Peanuts characters that he developed were based somehow on some aspect of his own personality. I always thought that was a fascinating approach for a comic to take. Peanuts, of course, has become beloved by all. It's called Peanuts, oddly enough, because of the Howdy Doody show. Peanuts came out in 1950. It had been called Little Folks in the St. Paul newspaper, and in 1950, when Charles Schultz went to syndicate it, the syndicate said, oh, we're going to call it Peanuts because on Howdy Doody, the little kids are called the Peanut Gallery. Charles Schultz hated that it was called Peanuts. He did not approve, but they said, if you want the deal, it's going to be called Peanuts, and that's where the name came from. He thought it didn't make any sense because there was no one named Peanut in the strip. We all know it as Peanuts now, so I guess it turned out fine. Peanuts ran from 1950 to 2000 when Charles Schultz passed, and is still a very beloved cartoon, not just with my generation, but with generations of children all the way to today, thanks in large part to the success of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Peanut stuff is cool. It doesn't sell for a ton. It's not an important antique. It's a fun vintage item that I think someone will really delight in seeing again, and we're going to put it out at just $4.99. They typically sell for about $10. And while we're on the dog kick, this is Pip Emma, as it says on the label. This is by Hagen Renneker. We pronounce it Hagen Renneker. In all likelihood, it was probably Hagen because the Rennekers were a husband and wife couple, and they got a loan from Ole Hagen, the wife's father, to start the company, and they decided to honor him by putting his name in the Hagen Renneker name. Pip Emma is very cute. She's a Spaniel. She's from the Pedigree dog line. These were done by Tom Masterson, who was specifically hired to do the Pedigree dogs. They are a size that is bigger than their miniatures and a little smaller than their largest figures. Hagen Renneker, when they first started, made a lot of larger items, and one day a brownie troupe, the Brownie Girl Scouts, came to see how pottery was made, and Mrs. Renneker said, hmm, I'm going to make a little duck figure that we can put in the kiln that'll cook quickly, and then we can show the girls how this is done, and her husband looked at it and said, this is what we should be doing, and so he switched all the production over to animal miniatures, and that worked because Hagen Renneker stayed in business for a very long time, and in fact, their descendant company is still producing today in Tennessee. These were done in the California pottery and have not been made in several years, and so they are rather collectible now. Emma typically sells for about $35, but we are just starting her out at $9.99. Hopefully, she'll go to a new home. She's a good girl. I've been working through a collection of letter openers, and I saved this one until now because I think it's really, really pretty, and I wanted to get it online now because it is made of silver, and silver is very popular right now. Letter openers changed from a simple paper knife in the 1700s to very elegant desk accessories in the Victorian era because of the invention of pre-made envelopes with glue. This one has a wonderfully constructed openwork handle with the rows, and this one is German. Now, this is coin silver. The mark may be difficult for you to see, but it's right at the top of the blade, and it says Germany 0.835. What that means is that this is 83.5% pure silver. That is typically the range of coins. Coinage, depending on the country in the days when silver coins were made, ran anywhere between about 80% silver and 90% like the silver dollar I showed you earlier, and then above that you get into sterling silver. Coin silver was a little less pure because coin silver needed to be a little harder because it would wear better, and that is also true of things like letter openers. They did not want this to flex or bend, and so they put a little bit of an alloy in it. So that's why it's made of coin silver. It's really nicely detailed all the way down the blade and a monogram, and then on the back, and this appears to be an old inscription above my thumbs, it says Sisters Forever. Nowadays, we hear the term Sisters Forever, and we assume that that means friends who consider themselves like sisters. But back when this was done, I suspect this was actually a presentation piece from one sister to another because this piece should date sometime around 1910. It's got a real Art Nouveau style to it. You can see all the detail all the way up the handle. It's just very, very pretty. It weighs approximately one ounce of silver, and of course silver is selling, gosh, in the high $30 range now, so we know intrinsically it's worth at least that. But we're just going to start it at $9.99 because, again, with a silver piece, I know this will bid up to the value of the silver or greater, and actually it should be greater because of the detail and the wonderful work in this piece. So we're going to put this out and see how much of a premium this is worth above the intrinsic value because it is a wonderful letter opener. Well, that piece was from pre-war Germany. This piece came from right after World War II in Germany, and that's part of its appeal. This is a cigarette case, and on the front is a map of the U.S. zone of Germany. And this shows the part of Germany that we occupied, which was the southern part, Munich, and points up into the industrial area. Britain occupied the north, and the Soviets occupied the east, and then would not let it go. This piece was made between 1946 and 1949. That was the very short period of occupation. If you look in the corner, it has an inscription, To Mom from Joe, so G.I. Joe. And in the top, we have the USA-U.S. zone logo with the globe showing that we are in control of the world, which was important to people after World War II because things had been so out of control. Interesting the spelling of soviet. On the inside, when you open it, this piece is turned metal. This originally would have been a cigarette case, but this isn't really how we advertise these now because filtered cigarettes were invented, and they're really too big for this. So usually what we do with these is to use them as billfold or business card holders. A lot of people carry in now for those purposes, and they're handy because with this clip, they don't all fall out when you open it. And then you can remove them. I like the turned metal. It definitely was a new idea after World War II. By the 1950s, you saw the dashboards of American cars having this feature because it's rather flashy. And I always tell people when you have this kind of a clasp to keep it preserved for future generations, push in before you shut it rather than clicking it, clicking it, clicking it, because you do wear every time you do the clicking. On the back, it has a map of the United States, the lower 48, because Alaska and Hawaii were still territories at this time. It's just a really interesting piece the way it's made. There are a lot of people who collect militaria who find U.S. zone marked items rather interesting, and that is likely to be the collector of this, or somebody who had somebody in the family who served in the U.S. zone, or somebody who thinks it's interesting and likes maps, or somebody who wants to use it as a billfold or to hold business cards. So it's got multiple collectors, and that's why I think it's interesting and why I think it will find a new home. We're going to find out right now. And we're putting it out for $19.99. We do have a buy it now on this, and I mention that because this video does go out early access to our Patreon and our channel members on the level 2 and 3 levels. We do that as a thank you for the fact that they give a little bit of extra to the channel, and that gives us the time to do this research and present these videos that are deeper dives. If you're interested in membership, look under the dashed line in the description of this video, and you can click the link to find out more about membership and its perks. This piece is going on eBay because I had a specific request from a collector to put it there. So we're going to do that now. This is a telegraph key and sounder. The telegraph key is this part here where you tap out the Morse code, and the sounder is this part where it receives impulses from other telegraphs that are sent and clicks it out for you so that you can hear. And if you knew Morse code, you would be able to decipher what was being sent to you. This one is by Mesco, and it is marked Mesco on the upper corner of the sounder there. Mesco was the Manhattan Electrical Supply Company, and they were in business from 1880 to 1917. After that time, the telephone starts to replace the telegraph, and so Mesco, which made a lot of other electronic parts, went into other businesses. This one you can tell is from about 1900 because even though it's a rather utilitarian piece, it has this pin striping. See the gold that's painted on there? That was something you see around 1900 as an extra decorative item on cast iron pieces. Everything just got a little bit of extra back then. This was invented by Samuel Morse in 1844, along with Morse code, because he realized, yeah, you can send these clicks, but we've got to be able to interpret them on the other end. It changed everything. First of all, telegraph poles popped up all over the country because they had to be able to send this electrically, but also for the first time in human history, you could have direct communication with other people in long distances. In fact, when I mentioned that the state of Nevada got statehood very suddenly right at the end of 1864, the governor of the territory had to spend the equivalent of $85,000 in current dollars to send the telegraph, telegraphing all of the details of the Nevada Constitution so that Congress could approve it and ratify their admission as a state, which I believe happened on Halloween. So the telegraph, a very, very important thing in the development of world history, let alone American. This one's in really great shape. It probably could be made to work. It did have insulation on the wires underneath. You can see most of that is worn off. That would be the only thing that you would really need to do to have it in full working order, but it's a nice unit, and I'm going to let the person who wanted me to put this on know that it's on, and hopefully they'll have a chance to take a look at it and maybe have it in their collection, or perhaps it will go to someone else. And that's part of the reason we do 10-day auctions is because we want people to have a chance to look at these things. This one is starting out at $49. We're not doing a buy it now because, to be honest with you, the prices on these really seem to vary quite a lot depending on the unit, and there's a lot of nuance in that. And because I don't deal in these on a regular basis, I'm going to let people who know take a look at this and tell me what the value should be. Is it time for tea? Well, it might be if you are a collector of wonderful English porcelain, and the Paragon Company is one of the most collectible makers, not just of cups and saucers, but of porcelain in general. This piece is a cabbage rose pattern on a sort of periwinkle blue background, and it has an interesting feature that tells us that this one was made in the 1930s because it has the double warrant that they could produce for the royalty, and it says that it was done under the auspices of Queen Mary, who was the wife of George V, and she gave her assent to Paragon having the royal warrant in 1933. They had already received it from other members of the royal family before that, but for it to come from the queen was a real honor. And when you see the double logo on there, the double warrant, that makes it an earlier piece and a more collectible piece if you find Paragon China. Paragon was made until 1960 in their own factory, and then they were purchased by Royal Dalton, and the name continued for a period of time after that. And Queen Mary was quite a collector herself. You may have heard me say, and it is true, that the other royalty did not enjoy being visited by Queen Mary because if she saw things that she liked in your house, it was expected you would give them to her as a gift. So you hid all your heirlooms before Queen Mary came to call. Queen Mary is not with us anymore, but the cup and saucer is, and it's a very pretty piece with great contrast. Prices on these really depend on the patterns. This one we're starting out at $9.99. I've seen this pattern sell for around $35. Some of their patterns I've seen sell for $135. And if you needed a pastime during your afternoon tea, well, in 1897 you could get The Game of Famous Paintings. This one is done by the Cincinnati Game Company. It's in great shape overall. There is one little stain on the of the box there. And for full disclosure, one small little tear there. But the box itself has held the cards very nicely, and the cards are immaculate and crisp and unbent and in really great shape. And they do show some of the famous paintings of the time and earlier times. It also has the original instructions in a booklet inside, and it does show a lot of works of the great masters. The Monarch of the Glen, Jerome's Cleopatra and Caesar, Caravaggio's Diana, Titian's Self-Portrait, to which he refers himself in the third person, Raphael's Cherub, a very famous painting, The Gleaners by Millais, which we see in so many prints, and a lot of other really beautiful paintings from the past. Interestingly enough, nothing by Leonardo da Vinci, which seems like rather an oversight. Perhaps they had some trouble getting the rights. It's a really sweet and complete set. I'm starting this off at $9.99. We have a buy at now of $45. I did see one sell for $55 recently, so I think that's a pretty fair price for what it is. I have always been a big fan of fiesta wear. I've always liked the original colors. I always thought the green was so minty and just soothing, but this one is not your usual fiesta mug because you turn it around the back, and it has a hard-to-find advertisement for Lazarus, the 86th anniversary of the Lazarus department store in Columbus, Ohio. And this is rather unusual. Homer Laughlin was doing pretty well in the Depression, and for the most part, they didn't need to do promotional items or advertising items like a lot of the other Depression-era companies did to stay in business. But Lazarus was a pretty important department store, and I think they just decided that being in Ohio and being of importance that they were going to make Lazarus happy. And so these were done as a promotion for the store to give out. The economy was actually going back into recession in 1937, so anything that could get people into the store and giveaways and premiums were definitely a big feature of Depression-era marketing. Lazarus itself was a very interesting store because they started in 1851 as a men's haberdashery, quickly became a major department store, were one of the first modern department stores with a big store in Columbus, and around 1910 became possibly the first, at least one of the first stores, to allow you to return merchandise. They were very customer-focused. The other thing is they loved the holidays. They put big displays in the windows, one of the first department stores to do that. And they are credited with coming up with the idea of Black Friday, where you had big sales right after Thanksgiving to kick off the holiday season. So all of you folks who are into Black Friday, well, you have Lazarus to thank for that. This is significant for a few different reasons, and it's an interesting go-along if you're a Fiesta collector, but I suspect that the ultimate collector for these probably is someone living in Columbus. We're going to find out now. Long, long ago in a universe far, far away, Star Wars came to be. And by 1978, a series of comic books came to be as well. And this is number eight. What's significant about number eight is that bunny creature. This is one of the very first creatures in the extended lore of Star Wars to be shown. It is not someone who was in the movie. In fact, Jackson T. Tamparacki has never been in a Star Wars movie, but he has an entire bio on Wikipedia because he has been used as a character in many of the comics and the later stories. And there is talk that he may appear for the first time in the next movie. He is a Lepi, obviously based on Lepus or rabbit. And that was an attempt by the people with the Star Wars franchise when this came out to get younger readers interested. They thought if we have a character that's a little more comic book friendly looking, that maybe we can get the kid brothers and sisters of the people who were into the movie and into the serious characters to participate and want to read this. And there is actually nostalgia for this character as a result, and it makes this particular comic a little bit more desirable. Now the early comics have collectors. It would be worth a lot more if it was graded. This one seems to be in really good condition. It doesn't seem to have a lot of bumps, bruises, creases, stains, tears. It's a pretty clean copy, but the cost of grading is high enough that I talked to my friend in Portland who deals in Star Wars stuff and he said it's just not worth spending the money to have it graded unless you're keeping it for your own collection. So we're going to sell it at eBay market rate and let someone who gets it in their collection decide if they want to have it graded and keep it in a nice poly bag. But in the meantime, it's a very nice reading copy. The colors are all in good shape, and there's wonderful ads for how you can get in on the profits in small engine service and repair, and how you can subscribe to the superheroes, but also, of course, the main story. And the colors are good. This came from the household of a woman who had this as a child and allowed me to buy her Star Wars collection recently. So we're going to put it out there at $4.99. They really should sell somewhere in about the $9.99 range, and then if they decide to get it graded, it could sell for substantially more. And that brings us to our last item, and our last item is back to the future because this was the future at the 1955 New York Auto Show. Three exciting new idea cars from Chrysler Corporation, and this is a fold-out. This was when Virgil Exner, who had been with Studebaker and helped design their early post-war cars, had gone to Chrysler, taken over the design department, and was advocating for the forward look, as they called it, and big fins. This is predating that by a couple of years, but this is showing people the direction that Chrysler is going. Now these cars were actually designed by Ghia in Italy, but you'll see certain things that appear on later Chryslers, like this big central egg crate grille that you see on the Falcon, which is a very cute sports roadster. They actually talked about putting it into production, but Chrysler's engineering nixed the idea. There's also the Flight Sweep 1 and 2. The side with the big fins and the back panel with the fake continental spare tire end up being features on the 1957 Plymouth Fury, which was a gigantic sales success. Chrysler really was on to something here, and they introduced these at the New York Auto Show. They gave out these folios. It was their world premiere, and it really made a stir. And that's why people who are fans of 1950s cars, concept cars, and auto styles in general, are fans of these type of paper collectibles. This one was in a collection for a long time. At some point, it had something paper clipped to it, which left a mark. Otherwise, it's in good shape overall. I think they are exciting cars. I'd be happy to drive one. There were only two made, and Virgil Exner kept one of them for himself. And another one was sent to Venezuela and given away as a prize. Whether either of those are still in existence or not is unknown, so it may be the only way to have one of these cars is to have this piece of paper right here. And that's why even though we're starting it off at $9.99, we figure that the selling price will probably be around our buy it now of $25. Well, I just feel so blessed to have come into some really fun and interesting things, and to be able to share them with you. You can click the links below to see how they're doing on eBay and place a bid if they're still available and they interest you. But it's just so much fun to share the stories because you don't have to buy all of it to enjoy all of it. And that is why I love sharing all of this vintage information on this channel. Thank you so much for your support and for joining me for this, and we'll see you again soon. If you enjoyed this video, check out this one. Also, click thumbs up to like this video and the description for information about our Patreon, our memberships. We've got a lot of different levels with different perks and bonus videos and early content. Also, please do check out our website, theantiquenomad.com for appraisal help. And we'll see you again for more adventures in the antique and vintage community soon. Bye for now.