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Collectors And Their Collections

I have a collection of straight razors. It's pretty much a cigar box full. My father had a few that came to me. His deceased relatives razors and a couple of shaving mugs were passed to him. My father-in-law actually collected straight razors and his collection was added to mine. I've never bought a straight razor but have a small collection of them. I suppose they can be purchased new today if one really wanted one. They were once a daily tool.

Speaking of my FIL, he was a collector of sorts. I got his razors as I mentioned. I also got his collection of belt buckles. Some are pretty cool looking and others rather generic. He also had a collection of can / bottle openers (church keys) Most all of them had a beverage logo and doing some research I found that most of the openers were old and actually had some value. Many of them can be dated by the logo.. where it is on the opener.. etc. I had no idea that he was a collector. He never spoke of collecting.
 
I have another worthless collection I haven't mentioned. :) I graduated from a GI Joe Walkie Talkie to saving my money and buying a citizens band radio when I was in the seventh grade. I talked my mother into applying for a license and being a member of the household I became a legitimate operator. This was years before the roger good buddy CB days. At that time it was common to exchange a QSL card with a contact. It was a card you had printed with your call sign and name and location. I started swapping cards with non contacts in an attempt to get a card from every state. It took three years to complete my collection. I, somewhere in my shed, have a double 3x5 card file cabinet full of QSL cards. It was a quest and a cheap one. Postage wqs only a nickel at that time. :)
 
I collected magnets as a kid. I was fascinated by them. I'd buy them from thrift shops, trade equally valued junk with the neighborhood kids for them, and tear down broken toys that had a motor for them. A combination of thinking they were cool and a compassion for collecting created a respectable glob of worthless magnets that went into the dumpster when I left home.

My mother-in-law collected glass owls. She had a respectable collection of them when she passed away. I don't think any were necessarily valuable but they made a cool display as a group. Lacking the space or desire to store them after her demise, I sold them on ebay. I likely gleaned around three hundreds bucks for her collection but it sure was fun watching other obsessed owl ladies bidding against each other.
 
i finally got the 100 year old Royal typewriter but alas some idiot removed the damn ribbon. I hope they're available because I hate relying on internet shopping. Don't even know where to look. We don't have print shops here anymore. Does Office Depot even carry them? Staples pulled a K-mart and EOL'd.

Also found a pretty much brand new 1960s Lasko Box Fan. Literally never been used. Not a speck of dust anywhere. Also a Radio Shack wireless lamp controller that still works

Our local vendor mall, located in an old department store building, has a booth full of glass and ceramic owls. If they were deer, I'd have gotten a curio cabinet and bought the whole lot
 
Our Office Depot still sells dot matrix printers for like 299 dollars. I can't imagine who'd use one today. That and fax machines. That's the only place i can check and will later. The typewriter is beautiful just missing the ribbon which it definitely had when I browsed last week and tested it to see if it works. Many used typewriters no longer advance the drum when you type and i have no clue how to troubleshoot that.
 
Being entirely mechanical, a visual should tell the story. I never was a wizard of electronic equipment but mechanical problems are easily identified. A missing tension spring or a worn or miss aligned gear should be easily seen and often easily repaired.
 
nickdalzell said:
Our Office Depot still sells dot matrix printers for like 299 dollars. I can't imagine who'd use one today.
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Usually it's anyone who needs to print on multipart stationery, which doesn't work with laser or inkjet, e.g. shipping agents often use dot matrix printers for printing waybills, bills of lading, etc.

nickdalzell said:
That and fax machines. That's the only place i can check and will later. The typewriter is beautiful just missing the ribbon which it definitely had when I browsed last week and tested it to see if it works. Many used typewriters no longer advance the drum when you type and i have no clue how to troubleshoot that.
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I can't imagine who'd use a mechanical typewriter today. :p



Annie Wilkes(Kathy Bates) with her Royal (Misery 1990).
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a mechanical typewriter works during a power failure, while a fax machine and/or dot-matrix printer is obsolete in 2023. Fax was convenient when landlines were still plentiful and before email ultimately replaced it. We only have an active fax machine at work for the 10% of customers who still don't have internet (surprisingly it's that high a number)

BTW I was able to get a parts typewriter from another booth that had a ribbon that was brand new in it. I also got that machine to work so I will source a ribbon for it one day as well. Office Depot employees looked at me as if I were a dragon at the mere mention of 'typewriter ribbon'

Owensboro is a weird place. Parts of it are all 'modern' and therefore alienating to me, while other parts are still stuck in the 1960s Mayberry look and feel. I prefer to stick to those latter bits as shrinking as they are...
 
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In a past life I did house remodeling for many years.

Some of my best treasures have been found in the attics and under the old homes I have worked on.

I could not take this one home but anyone remember these ?

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We had one of those built in to our home that was built in the late 1980s. that house also had a trash compactor. You don't see those anymore, either. I haven't seen someone use an iron these days either. Every piece of clothing is mostly permenant press.

I 'built' my interior out of remnants of the 1950s from stuff found at vendor malls. Now my home, with the exception of the LCD TVs (which most are from 2009-10) and laptops, which are from 2007 and 2011 respectively, is stuck in a sort of '50s time capsule, straight from the house in Leave it to Beaver

I'd love to have a Frigidaire Flair stove though. But not about to gut my entire kitchen to attempt to drag out all the 2012 appliances it came with, find a place to offload them, and source a Samantha Stevens' kitchen appliances if I can even find them. But that was one neat range/oven combo.
 
ozonetrooper said:
In a past life I did house remodeling for many years.

Some of my best treasures have been found in the attics and under the old homes I have worked on.

I could not take this one home but anyone remember these ?

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View attachment 167795View attachment 167797
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I've installed many modern versions of self storing ironing boards through the years. They were designed to fit in a standard stud cavity. I repaired and remodeled an early 1900 home back in the early seventies that had a job built self storing ironing board. There were many hand crafted items in that old home and the woodworking was top notch. The surrounds of the steam heat radiators were all cross hatch constructed and beautiful. Copper lined laundry chute and gutters represented a different time. The oddest thing in the house as a metal peg that stuck out of the floor in the dinning room. When you stepped on it, it rang a bell in the kitchen. All mechanical cabled and still functional.

I spent over three month remodeling a 10,000 square foot three story for a local college. They turned the old house into a home for the college president. I had the luxury of having period woodworking to rob from a number of house that the university had purchased to wreck to build a new dormitory. It was a treasure trove of old items. In repairing the old porch which was constructed on staggering cut stones to allow air to move under, I found many old newspapers. They went through the porch wall instead of onto the porch when they were tossed by some kid back in the early nineteen hundreds. Sale ads and help wanted were so interesting to look through. They told a story of an entirely different time, lifestyle, obsolete items, and a glaring display of prejudice and racism. I also found a lot of empty whiskey bottles. They were somewhat hidden in the cavities around the basement where the joists met the rim over the basement walls. All of the corks were gone. I found an old boy scout folding knife and some pocket change here and there in the old house. Old houses contain old treasures!
 
I just thought of another item I found in one of the soon to be removed houses. I found a hump back steamer trunk. I did not have any place to keep it but I brought it home and gave it to my father. I have no idea what my step mother did with it after my father's death. It looked similar to this trunk.
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i stopped walking into abandoned homes because I came out with more junk than I needed. I did, however, scavenge an untold number of incandescent bulbs from a soon-to-be-demolished home because I heard Biden was gonna double down on what Obama did but ensure all incandescent bulbs were no longer sold, not just those above 40 watts. I am sorry but LEDs give me headaches and eye strain. It's awful enough that streetlights went from comforting glow of orange to blindingly blue or purple in places, and we wonder where all the fireflies and butterflies went?
 
Never thought about the collecting aspect, but I loved magnets as a kid also. The only remnant that I have now is a cow magnet that can be unscrewed to get all the pieces apart. Still fun to mess with
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olbriar said:
I collected magnets as a kid. I was fascinated by them. I'd buy them from thrift shops, trade equally valued junk with the neighborhood kids for them, and tear down broken toys that had a motor for them. A combination of thinking they were cool and a compassion for collecting created a respectable glob of worthless magnets that went into the dumpster when I left home.
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I remember playing with elecrtromagnets as a kid, with some sort of cheap electrical discovery kit. You'd wrap wire around a nail and tie it to a 9V battery and pick up screws and junk. Stupid me figured more volts = more power and tried to rig it to 110V and I discovered what a short circuit was instead.
 
nickdalzell said:
a mechanical typewriter works during a power failure,
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Yeah, if you want to keep on typing a novel when the power is out. Thinking of "Paul Sheldon" and the antique Royal in Stephen King's "Misery". A situation I've never been in myself.

What did surprise me a bit, that Flying Fish in Shanghai actually still does make new mechanical typewriters in 2023. But probably the only company in the world that does.

nickdalzell said:
while a fax machine and/or dot-matrix printer is obsolete in 2023. Fax was convenient when landlines were still plentiful and before email ultimately replaced it. We only have an active fax machine at work for the 10% of customers who still don't have internet (surprisingly it's that high a number)
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So these things still have uses in certain situations. Like using an impact printer if one has to print on multipart stationery, or if you want to print with a collectable vintage PC that doesn't support anything recent. I do believe daisywheel printers are completely obsolete now though, no longer made.

I know faxing is still very popular in Japan, due to how the banks and business works there.
www.aljazeera.com

Fax machines and cash-only stores: Japan struggles to go digital

Japan's economy is, in many ways, stuck in the past despite the country's futuristic image abroad.
www.aljazeera.com www.aljazeera.com
 
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I haven't even had to own a printer since I left college. I have nothing to actually print. But it was fun today converting digital PDF documents to print via the typewriter though. Now I don't need a damned computer at work.
 
I also found a lot of empty whiskey bottles.
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I love finding old bottles, some that I have "collected" along the way :

Clorox bottle

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Various jars/bottles

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And my fav, soda pop bottles (a couple of them have the brand name made into the glass bottle)

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The triple X bottles have a bottling stamp on them, they were made at the bottling company that was here before I was born, same with the beer bottles behind the 7up bottle.

The root beer bottles were under a house, the beer bottles were in two six pack cardboard cartons, (tattered and falling apart from heat/age) in an attic, the lipstick was in the dirt next to a brick footing, (along with several trinkets) under a house. I have been told that mice would steal the shiny trinkets and take them back to their lairs under the house.

I have never seen another one of these, metal lipstick tube that still works :

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Nice collection @ozonetrooper . The soda bottles with the raised glass labels were in use when I was a kid. They were all recyclable with a deposit and return system. Those raised letters took the brunt of the reuse abrasion and were often nearly white from wear.

I patched on an old farm house years ago that had a cellar full of glass top mason jars. The glass was colored and had many bubbles. The guy I was working with took some of them home. I might have grabbed one myself but no clue where it might be now.
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Speaking of old glass. I gathered up three different types of glass insulators as a kid. They were cool looking. I tossed them when I moved out.
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