Black Market Antiques Blog

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.

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.

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.

If you haven’t heard…The History Channel has a new antiques oriented show on Monday evenings at 9 PM EST.  It is called American Pickers.  The show is a reality based video documentary style program that follows two pickers, Mike Wolf and Frank Fritz, on their treks through the countryside looking for antiques.  If you’re looking for another Antiques Roadshow type program, this isn’t it - too light on info.  If you’re looking for another Bargain Hunt or Cash in the Attic type program, this isn’t it - too light on info and way too light on personality.  Still the show is worth at least checking out.  The History Channel website for the show has clips that you can watch (if you’re worried about wasting an entire hour).

Recently a couple of our pickers stopped in with a load of antiques to the Black Market Antiques office and the show was one topic of conversation during the visit.  Everyone seemed to give the show lukewarm reviews, which is considerably better than many of the posts on the History Channel forum for the show.  One picker was amazed at the relative ease at which Mike Wolfe got one of the sellers to part with merchandise for ridiculously low prices.  Which is one of my main issues with the show.

I have a saying “All auctioneers are going to hell.”  I told one auctioneer that and he replied “…and all antique dealers are going there too.”  After seeing the first three episodes of this series, I believe Mike & Frank will be there for sure, if not for ripping off old people and just being plain annoying, then for revealing secrets of the trade.

Maybe it’s just the way the show is edited, but I find it hard to believe those guys actually make a living as pickers.  Their “shop” (which is a pole building) looks brand new, as does their van and all the decals.  Perhaps those were History Channel incentives.  Mike and Frank’s Antique Archeology website is basically an advertisement for the show and was obviously made after the series was taped.  Mike’s grimacing at the price of the Vespa Ape and reaction to the price of the one seller’s carriages suggests that perhaps he isn’t the world renowned picker that the History Channel describes on their website.

All that said though, American Pickers was relatively entertaining and the consensus here is that everyone will keep watching it, even though everyone likes Pawn Stars better.  Future reviews may even be done on a per episode basis…possibly by the employee that is most annoyed with each episode.

I had two projects for this weekend, right a blog article and do the recycling.  Got the recycling done Saturday and put off the blog article for lack of a topic.  But now it’s Monday morning and I need to get the blog thing done before the boss has a fit.

Black Market Antiques strives to do our small part to help the environment by being as “Green” as possible.  This weekend, I drew the short straw and, as mentioned, got the task of doing the recycling for the warehouse.  Part of BMA’s green commitment involves recycling as much of our waste as possible.  This includes everything from cardboard scraps and junk mail to tin and other metals.  In addition to recycling, Black Market Antiques also tries to reuse items that do not fit in our online inventory of antiques and collectibles.

I started the recycling by separating all the paper, cardboard and metal scrap.  This included about 400 pounds of pamphlets from doctors’ offices in several large tubs that were found in a recent estate where we had to clear out everything.  If I needed to know about the latest and greatest kidney medications from 1982 or procedures for repairing a prolapsed rectum, I’m sure I could have found that info in the thousands of brochures.  Once separated I loaded the truck and was off to the local recycling drop off center where I put the different types of materials into their appropriate roll-off containers.

After the recycling was accomplished it was back to the warehouse to load up a load of mostly household items for delivery to the local donation thrift store.  Some local coffee mug collector will probably come close to peeing themselves with delight when the store puts out the couple hundred contemporary mugs onto the shelves for sale.  Lots of newer glassware and dishes went to the thrift store…along with what seemed like literally tons of newer children’s books.

In addition to recycling and donating goods, Black Market Antiques is proud of our effort to try to reuse as much packaging materials as possible from other local businesses.  Doing not only keeps this filler out of the landfills, at least for a time, but also helps to keep shipping costs down.

If you have an organization that is in need of second-hand items in the Brookville, Pennsylvania area, contact us to see if we have what you are looking for.  In the process of acquiring antique and collectible items, Black Market Antiques routinely ends up with a lot of household type goods and newer retail goods that just don’t fit our market.

I recently added a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy to the Black Market Antiques inventory.  My initial thought was that the photographers should probably be taking pictures of, well, better things.  But in doing the listing it brought back memories from my childhood (shows my age, or the lack thereof).

The Happy Meal toy in question was a Tamagotchi style keychain.  I remember seeing the McDonald’s commercial on TV advertising the toy.  Caught up in my own naivity and blinded by the overacting of the children on the commercial playing gleefully with their Tamagotchi Happy Meal toys, I wrongly assumed that by my parents purchasing a $2.99 I would get a real live Tamagotchi virtual pet.  My excitement quickly turned to disappointment before my father was even out of the McDonald’s drive-thru on our next trip to McDonald’s.  What I got as my “prize” was a crappy “Tamagotchi style” licensed keychain.

Not a real Tamagotchi, but it looked like one in the commercial.

I expressed my extreme disappointment with what I viewed as an obviously dishonest marketing campaign and vowed to boycott McDonald’s forever, as long as my parents would stop taking us there…  My rant was cut short by my dad telling me to shut up and eat my food.

I never did get a real Tamagotchi, but the next Christmas I did get a digital dog virtual pet - a less expensive knock-off toy that carried with it an anticipation equal to that day in the McDonald’s drive through.  By that time I had heard my classmate’s tales of their “stupid Tamagotchis,” but I did not let their tales discourage my efforts, and I chalked their complaints up to them being bad Tamagotchi-parents.

Despite following the instructions and meticulously devoting every waking hour to my virtual puppy, I had killed him four times before New Year’s Day.  The stupid thing kept begging for food and refusing to take naps.  I’d push the buttons to make his bed appear, and he’d be inside it and appear to sleep for just long enough for me to start playing with other toys.  Then he’d be beeping at me within moments begging for food, which you had to give him or he’d get unhappy and sick.  After the fourth overeating death, I never played with the toy again.

ADMIN Note: Today Sarah has a healthy normal-weight 3 year old boy that she has yet to kill even once, despite his constant requests for food and refusal to take naps.

The King of Pop is dead, though I’m sure there will be sightings of him at Dennys and theme parks for the next three decades.  I don’t mean to sound callous, but I was never really a Michael Jackson fan and did not know the man personally.   So I’m more amazed by the collectibles aspect rather than sadenned by his loss.

Ecommerce music sites online have been getting hammered with traffic all evening.  A search for some products on Google Products Search returns lots of results for Michael Jackson albums, video games and collectibles, but clicking into a lot of the stores you’ll find that many of the items have already been snapped up.

Sega put out Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker video game in 1990, which was actually co-developed by Jackson himself.  For the past two decades this game cartridge was valued at around $25-40 depending on whether or not the game included original box and instructions.  In the past three hours, virtually every copy online has been gobbled up by nostalgic fans and/or speculators.  Some copies of the game have been selling for hundreds of dollars.  A completed items search on eBay shows that in the past few weeks, there have been copies of the same exact game that didn’t get a single bid at the opening bid price - which often was below $10.

The antiques and collectibles field is a funny business.  It will be interesting to see what direction Michael Jackson collectibles take in the coming days.  There are bound to be disappointed dealers who sold too soon and likewise dealers who waited too long.

UPDATE: It seems as if those dealers who waited more than about four hours after Jackson’s death to post their items for sale have lost out.  The video game mentioned in this post is now available for much less.  And when I posted this blog article, there were only two left on eBay.  Now there are 140 of them.  And on Google shopping there are even more than that.  Three days ago there were only a couple dozen available on Google Products Search.

Black Market Antiques would like to congratulate our customer Charlene O. for winning Baltimore’s Best Hon 2009 contest (Honfest).  Charlene purchased our 1980’s Black & Red Dice Glam Dangle Earrings (the only pair we had, sorry ladies) to complete the her costume.  The theme of her costume was “Bird in Pair a Dice”.

Baltimore's Best Hon 2009 Winner Charlene O.

We love to hear how our products are used, displayed or given as gifts. If you have a fabulous story to tell about a product you found on BlackMarketAntiques.com please let us know!

Last week we received new company phones here at Black Market Antiques.  My new phone was not much more technologically advanced than my personal phone, which is a couple of years old, but my new company phone is equipped with a GPS navigational system.  As I was playing around with the GPS I couldn’t help but thinking that it was so much nicer than having a map or an atlas.  It was then I realized that I had completely taken technology for granted.

I was reminded of a conversation I had with my Grandfather after I got my first cell phone more than a decade ago.  My Grandfather - who is now in his mid-90’s - told me that he could remember the first phone to be installed in his rural community.  A family that lived next door (1/2 mile away in rural Pennsylvania at the time) got the first phone.  He remembered the exact year some seventy years later, yet I can’t remember the date from his story ten years ago.  He said that everyone in the area already thought of the family as being rich, but when the family got a telephone they suddenly became obscenely rich in everyone’s eyes.  That family’s house still stands today and it’s ~1200 square feet of space seem tiny by today’s standards.

My new phone that weighs four ounces has more functions than 500 pounds worth of items that were either not invented or available to my Grandfather as a child.   It’s easy to forget that less than a hundred years ago there was no television, radios were bulky and often enormous, telephones were scarce in most of the country, the only medium for playing music was hand-cranked victrolas, if you wanted to look up a location in another county it required a thick heavy atlas…etc.  Even the seemingly simple function of having a calculator on my cell phone is a marvel when considering the type of  intricate and complex calculating machines available a hundred years ago, many of which weighed 25 pounds or more themselves.

I am in my early thirties and was born before video games, CD’s,  VCR’s, satellite television, personal computers and GPS….  The world has changed so much since I was a child, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like for my Grandfather to see such advances in technology, and even harder to imagine what kind of technology will be available sixty years from now when I’m his age.

If you watch television, listen to the radio or read any sort of periodical there’s no doubt you’ve seen or heard the “Cash for Gold” advertisements.  In down economic times you may be tempted to send one of these companies some of your jewelry, and if times are really bad, you might consider even sending in some sentimental family heirlooms in the hopes of making ends meet for another couple of weeks.  Before you send any type of gold to such a company, we highly suggest you reconsider.

The internet is full of sites warning of the Cash for Gold type companies and for good reasons.  And many message boards and blogs where the companies are mentioned end up turning into sounding boards for irate sellers who fell for the scam.  In addition to paying way below market prices for gold, these companies often attribute no value to any jewelry that has any type of stones (including valuable diamonds and other precious stones), which the company will say needs to be “processed.”  Also, they do not give any value to silver jewelry or other items that are sent to them.  And God forbid you send them a nice piece of jewelry that is platinum.

These companies also do not attribute any additional value for antique or collectible gold jewelry.  Many pieces of jewelry, especially antique jewelry have values that far exceed the weight of the metal’s value.  So your Grandma’s Tiffany 18k bracelet would be considered to be the same thing as he old gold fillings.

For some further information on such scams and more in depth tactics used by the companies, visit this website, or simply do a search in Google for “cash for gold scams” - with over half a million results, there’s lots of info out there.

So how do you sell your gold?  That’s a good question that many people obviously don’t know, otherwise the Cash for Gold companies would not be able to afford to spend millions on advertising.  The first thing you need to do is determine an estimated value of your gold.  The gold price at this very moment is $916.38 per troy ounce or $835 per regular ounce.  To get real time gold prices, we suggest this online precious metals calculator.  At the current gold price an average men’s class ring would be worth around $80 in scrap (using 6-7 g / ~4 pennyweight).

If your gold jewelry is not antique and was just purchased at a department store or jewelry store chain, it is unlikely to be worth much more than the scrap value when trying to sell it to anyone.  Obviously fancy engagement rings with diamonds would have additional value, and a jeweler should be consulted for an appraisal.  If your jewelry is antique, ask your local jeweler for an appraisal and get a second opinion from a knowledgeable antique jewelry dealer in your area - any antique store should be able to recommend someone.

Who do you sell your gold to?  Basically anyone who will give you a fair value.  Most buyers of gold and jewelry will give you roughly the same price (approximately 80% of the current gold market value).  Anyone offering significantly less should be avoided.  Buyers who are easily found anywhere include just about any jewelry store, pawn shops, decent resale or thrift stores, and just about any antique store.  Whoever you choose to buy your jewelry should never take any value off for diamonds in the jewelry.  Semi-precious stones and pearls may or may not result in a lowered value depending on their size and number on the jewelry in question.