From the Marble Buyer inbox
Letters from the Jar
Every week somebody writes to me about marbles they did not expect to own. The marbles are usually interesting. The notes that come with them are better.
People find me at an odd moment. A parent has died, a house is being cleared, a storage unit got bought sight unseen, or a jar came out of a dresser and nobody in the family knows what to do with it. They send photographs and a few lines of explanation, and those few lines are often the best part of my week.
I have been collecting since 1975. In that time I have learned that the story attached to a collection tells me nearly as much as the glass does. Where it was kept. Who put it there. Whether anyone has been through it since.
Here are seven of them, with some of what I wrote back.
ON NOT KNOWING
They’ve sat in a bowl in my China cabinet for at least 15 years. I know nothing about marbles. They all look like marbles to me.
This is the most honest sentence anyone has ever sent me, and it happens to be exactly right. A jar can hold a 1950s cat’s eye worth a nickel sitting up against a Christensen Agate worth three figures, and to an untrained eye they are both round, both glass, both pretty.
Telling them apart comes down to seams, how the color was put into the glass, and how the ends were finished. It is a learnable skill. It also takes a few thousand marbles to learn it, which is why you do not need to know. That part is my job.
ON FINDING THEM BY ACCIDENT
I found these while out looking for treasures. Was wondering if any of them are worth anything, or I should just give them to a kid.
Please do not give them to a kid yet. I say that with real affection, because marbles were made to be played with and there is nothing sad about a child ending up with them.
But a played marble is a damaged marble, and damage is most of what separates a fifteen dollar marble from a hundred and fifty dollar one. Let somebody look first. Then give the common ones to the kid, which is exactly where they belong.
ON WHERE THEY WERE KEPT
I found them in a cracked glass milk jug wrapped in masking tape in his garage…
This is how the good ones survive. A boy puts his marbles somewhere safe, grows up, and never opens the container again. Sixty years later the glass has not been rolled down a sidewalk and has not spent a decade rattling around in a coffee can with two hundred others.
The masking tape is the part that gets me. He wrapped it himself. In my experience collections that come out of a sealed container are consistently in better condition than collections that come out of a drawer, and condition is most of the value.
ON ESTATE SALES
These were located at my grandmother’s estate sale in a jar inside an old dresser.
A dresser drawer is a good sign. It means the marbles were put away deliberately rather than swept up at the end of somebody’s childhood.
It usually means something else too. By the time a jar reaches a table at an estate sale, the interesting ones have often already been pulled out by somebody in the family. A jar still sitting in the dresser when the sale opens is a jar nobody has gone through.
ON MARBLES IN UNLIKELY PLACES
My grandmother has multiple lamps she has had for over 60 years filled with marbles like these.
Marble filled lamps were genuinely a thing, right along with marble filled vases, ashtrays and glass table bases. Most of what went into them was bulk utility glass bought by the pound, so I will be straight with you, the odds on any given lamp are not wonderful.
But people filled those lamps with whatever marbles happened to be in the house. Every so often something real got poured in with the rest. It costs nothing to empty one onto a bath towel and have a look.
ON HAVING FAR TOO MANY
I have over 1000 marbles. Many pre 1950s. Some were my father’s 100 years ago. But I know nothing about which are which.
Nobody sorts a thousand marbles by staring at them. The trick is to stop sorting by what looks pretty and start sorting by how the marble was made.
Pull three piles. Anything with a single curving seam running around it. Anything with two rough or ground patches on opposite ends, which usually means handmade. Anything noticeably larger than the rest. Those three piles will hold nearly all of your value, and they are almost always small. The other nine hundred can stay in the jar.
ON THE ONES THAT ARE NOT FOR SALE
They were my kids when they were little.
Every so often a note arrives and the appraisal quietly stops being the point.
Marbles that were played with hard are worth less than marbles that sat in a jar, and that is simply how the market works. But nobody keeps their children’s marbles for thirty years because of the market. If you write to me about a bag like this one I will still tell you what is in it. I will also tell you when the honest answer is that it is worth more on your shelf than it is in my hands.
Send Me What You Found.
If you are holding a jar, a coffee can, a cigar box or a drawer full of glass and you have no idea what you are looking at, that is the normal starting point, not a disadvantage. You do not need to know a single maker’s name before you get in touch.
Send photographs and tell me whatever you know about where they came from, even if that is nothing at all. I read every message myself. No pressure. No obligation. Just a fair and honest opinion from a lifelong collector.
Messages are shared with names, locations and other identifying details removed, and lightly trimmed for length. My thanks to everyone who has taken the time to write.
