Black Market Antiques Blog

Zippo cigarette lighters can be dated very accurately, sometimes down to the month of manufacturer in the newer models, by using the stamps on the bottoms of the lighter.  The hinge type and design can also help to date the earlier models of Zippos.

If you have some old Ball canning jars laying around, they might all look the same at firsts, but there are ways of determining their approximate age.  Over the years the script/lettering that is embossed on the jars has changed and this can help you pinpoint what era any particular jar is from.

The image above comes from Bob Clay’s web page about dating Ball fruit jars, and he has a lot of other detailed info on his page about the process of dating Ball fruit jars and it is worth a read if you’ve got some jars that you’d like to know the ages of.

While speaking to an antique dealer and bottle digger over the weekend, the question came up about whether he’d ever found a body while digging for bottles.  His answer was no, but he did say that he had found an old skull while digging in an old dump…which he quickly replaced and moved to another area to dig.

This got me thinking about what types of weird and/or gross things that we’ve found while searching for antiques.  Below you will find some of our top picks from personal experience, feel free to add some of your own to the comments section.  In no particular order…

1. Dead Animals: While antiquing you’ll find a lot of dead little critters, mice, possums, etc.  The worst house as far as dead animals go had to be an old early 19th century stone house where we found about a dozen dead mummified kitty cats in the basement.  Some were sitting on the window sills looking out at freedom when they died and remained there for, apparently, years before we found them.

2. Poo: There are lots of types of poo, and we’ve found many of them in some odd places.  One house had about a dozen coffee cans randomly placed throughout the home, all with dried cat turds in them.  At a former group home, someone used a graniteware roaster as a chamber pot, and never bothered to dump it…that was a surprise.  Another home had a half dozen portable toilets in the basement, all full!

3. Blood: Everybody has blood, so it’s logical that you’ll find some occasionally.  We’ve found two knives in with kitchen utensils at houses that had exorbitant amounts of congealed blood on them, and not the kind of blood one might expect from butterflying a fillet.   On another occasion we found numerous items that apparently were present during some sort of CSI worthy crime scene as there was high velocity blood splatter all over the items.

4. Porn: Finding porn is always fun.  There’s always a market for porn, especially the good vintage stuff.  I especially like finding a stash that was meant to be hidden and presumably thrown away before the owner died.  One man (who had died) had a bathroom in his garage full of dozens of empty Vaseline jars dating back decades….and some porn.  One of our associates once found a cache of vintage kiddy porn on 8mm film in the basement of a home, along with other vintage adult films.  He left the kiddy stuff with the owner, who was actually the boy in the films, shot during the 1960′s.

If you’ve found some weird or gross things along the way in your antiquing, we’d love to read about it, post your comments about the worst things you’ve found.

BlackMarketAntiques.com has just uncovered a large collection of antique glass bottles.  The collection was found in an old local barn.  There are dozens of potato crates full of bottles and hundreds, if not thousands, of old bottles.  So far none of the bottles look to have been dug.

Most of the bottles that we’ve unwrapped (most are wrapped in old newspaper) are in very nice condition.  The collection looks to be made up of a lot of old medicine / remedy bottles, jars, and household jars.  We haven’t found anything with exceptional value yet, and aren’t getting our retirement hopes up over this collection, but there are a lot of collectible old bottles that all need good homes.

If you are interested in what bottles we find, you can keep an eye on our Just Listed Products page over the next few weeks.  You can also check out our Collectible Bottles category.  We’ve also found a number of old milk bottles in our initial assessment of the bottles, but milk bottles are in a different category, you can find them in our Milk Bottle Dairy Advertising category.

If you’re interested in the bottles, be sure to keep checking for the next few weeks.  We’re going to be pricing them reasonably and the good ones are sure to disappear quickly.

We’re updated our camera buying guide information page, just a bit, to cover cheap plastic cameras.

So what exactly is a cheap plastic camera?  Well, the camera pictured at the left is a good example.  It’s cheap both in cost and detail and is made almost entirely of plastic.  These cameras were made in Japan in the 1950′s and 60′s and later in Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China (in chronological order).  Some of the earliest cheap plastic cameras, the Diana series, for example, are quite collectible and have some good collector value, while newer ones are less desirable.  Still, there are a good number of photography enthusiasts that take cheap plastic cameras as a challenge and actually use them for photography.

In the 1970′s through today, many cheap plastic cameras were used as promotional items for advertising products and services and even as a part of magazine scams.  Many businesses and companies would offer a “Free Camera” to anyone ordering a product or showing up for a demo….and they weren’t giving away Voigtlanders.  Some of the cheap plastic cameras you find today in estate came from magazine and other scams where you could order a free camera.  When the camera would arrive it would be missing an integral part – such as the flash or lens – and there would be an order form with the camera so that you could order the part for a price so that you could use your camera.

This is one reason why many of the cheap plastic cameras that you find are in such good condition, they weren’t functional as they were received.  These cameras were never meant to take good photographs and certainly were not intended for photographer use.  Sure, some of them look really neat and high tech (for their time period anyway) and they use catchy names and text like (in the photo above) Quickshot X3000 – which likely has a shutter speed that is slower than most any Kodak.  Notice too, that the camera pictured has a “new optical lens” as opposed to a used one, apparently.

We’ve update the Black Market Antiques camera guide to include an addendum concerning cheap plastic cameras, which basically states that they are not guaranteed like the rest of the cameras.  If you are into photography and want the challenge and rewards of taking photos with a camera that cost 3 1/2 cents to produce, we wish you well….but, if you are buying a cheap plastic camera to use as your only camera to capture priceless moments in time on film, well, we urge you to save up your money and buy a camera that isn’t described as a “cheap plastic camera.”

If you are into hit & miss engines, steam engines or just antiques in general, you’ll want to take a trip to Coolspring, PA for this year’s Coolspring Power Museum Expo that’s taking place from June 17 through the 19th.  The expo is held in downtown Coolspring at the Power Museum grounds, just off state route 36, about 7 miles south of Brookville, Pennsylvania.

Admission to the event is a $5 per person donation, kids get in for free.  Vendors/swapper fee of $25.

This year is the silver anniversary of the Power Museum, which was started in 1985.  The expo offers lots of activities and demonstrations of all sorts of antique engines.  There’s also always a nice assortment of food vendors and flea market exhibitors or swappers at the swap meet with all sorts of antiques related to hit & miss engines and just antiques in general.

For more info on this year’s event, visit the Coolspring Power Museum website.

This is a cheesy souvenir gift in its original box from 1981.  It’s a Genuine California Earthquake in a Can.  Really it’s just a tin can with a ball inside that you shake and then set down…and it continues to shake on its own.   The most amusing part of this silly gag is that the can is printed with the warning “Caution: Do Not Swallow Can.”

An Action Comics #1 reportedly has sold for $1,000,000, marking the first time a comic book has eclipsed the million dollar mark.  The comic, which marked the first time Superman appeared, originally sold for ten cents in 1938.  The comic sold to a private buyer on Comiccconnect.com

The same comic book sold for $150,000 just 15 years ago.  The million dollar sale of the comic is doubly surprising in the current slow economic market.  The previous record high sale for a comic book was for the same title, which sold over $317,000 in 2009.

Black Market Antiques now has a Facebook page.  We invite you to visit our page and become a fan.  You’re probably wondering what’s in it for you?  Well, we don’t know yet.  But we’re working on it.  We may offer specials for our Facebook fans or we may make special announcements…you’ll have to make us a fan and just stay tuned.

For those of you who are into Twitter, you can follow us on Twitter too.

“Blindfolded, kiss the homeliest person in the room.”  Those were the instructions on one of the game pieces that we pulled from a vintage circa 1930′s party game called Smacks: A Kissing Party Game.  It’s probably hard, or at least undesirable, to imagine your grandparent or great-grandparents having a kissing-orgy as a means of entertainment.

When we found the game, it had already been partially played with a few of the little rolled up pieces of paper removed.  With instructions to seek out the ugliest person in the room to kiss, it seems like the game may have ended in an argument…rather than in an X-rated Depression era orgy of affectionate depravity.

Still lots of good plays left.