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One of the cool things about my scavenger life, which is mostly centered around looking through thousands of listings from these big consignment sellers, is that occasionally I get to come across listings where I would never know anything about. Consignment sellers just sell whatever can make them a buck, but that doesn’t mean they always do it well. Here’s this week’s example, which cost me a mere $7.50 because of the wacky title.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/363949188225?nordt=true&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc
I’m sure I won’t get rich off this guy (if I ever get around to listing it), but it’s really beautiful. If anyone knows anything about old letter openers, I’d love to know more. Not even sure where to get started to educate myself.
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Nice score! Scrimshaw is a little nebulous with legality, isn’t it? If it’s genuine ivory, you have to be able to prove it pre-dates the ivory ban laws, I believe. You might want to get a little creative with how you market it, just to be safe, if you’re selling it on eBay.
Hopefully I’m not talking out my rear on this one, but I used to run an antiques shop a while back and got my hands on some scrimshaw pieces that got removed from eBay (and got me a couple dings on my account for a while).
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Hopefully I’m not talking out my rear on this one, but I used to run an antiques shop a while back and got my hands on some scrimshaw pieces that got removed from eBay (and got me a couple dings on my account for a while).
Thanks for the info, this will probably keep me from listing the thing on eBay regardless of how much it’s worth. No amount of profit is worth dealing with VERO or prohibited items, not when there’s so many sellable items out there which won’t get you a ding from eBay.
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I sold two military-surplus small transformers that I got on consignment from a friend. Cheap sales (£5 and £10) within a couple of hours of listing to two separate buyers from Hong Kong. Which is weird- selling electronics to Hong Kong?
Seems with the letter opener that the seller meant to write Scrimshaw; there appears to be an artist called Barlow who is well-regarded.
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Seems with the letter opener that the seller meant to write Scrimshaw; there appears to be an artist called Barlow who is well-regarded.
The misspellings happen a lot with the big consignment sellers. What they lack in quality of specific listings they certainly make up for with quantity. Many of the sellers I buy from run 10,000 auctions or more every week! I miss the days where you could type in asterisks at the end of words to catch misspellings and plurals in your searches. But the weird items are still out there if you search hard enough.
Thanks for the tip on Barlow, this piece definitely appears to fit that artist’s style. With the whale imagery and lack of noticeable blade on the item, I’m wondering if I might have something other than a letter opener.
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Nothing crazy to report this week so far, but this weekend was our anniversary, so we decided to do an all day scavenging day, hitting up a number of yard sales, thrift stores, the Goodwill outlet, and a few dumpsters here and there. Then we stopped in at an out-of-the-way Chinese buffet on a whim. $12.99 per person was exactly the kind of cheap meal we were after, and it was pretty dang tasty, to boot!
One of the estate sales we went to was on their second day, toward the end of their hours, and they had a table expired food “Free to A Good Home.” We were picking out a few things here and there, when one of the ladies running the sale begged us to take as much as we could carry, else it was all going to be thrown away. Most of it was dry or canned goods that only expired within the last year, so it’s all still perfectly fine for eating. We figure it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $75-$125 of groceries. Not a bad haul!
Aside from the restaurant find and free food, we got three German & West Germany Cuckoo clocks for $10 a piece, a couple of unbuilt Revell models, a submarine and a fighter jet? (it’s some kind of aircraft, lol), for $5 a piece, and a few totes of bric-a-brac/store filler for a few bucks here and there at various sales. All in all, I’m quite happy with the weekend, and it was a great day out with my wife after keeping our noses to the grindstone for such a long stretch. It felt so good to get out of the routine.
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Seeing as we’re moving on to food. Picked up six bottles of wine on Saturday from a flea market. Mouton Cadet and similar from the 1990s- seems people buy wine and then never bother to drink it before they pass on to pastures new. Anyway I needed a bottle of Chianti to make some Peposo beef stew, and I got it. Covered in decades of kitchen grease.
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Nothing crazy to report this week so far, but this weekend was our anniversary, so we decided to do an all day scavenging day, hitting up a number of yard sales, thrift stores, the Goodwill outlet, and a few dumpsters here and there. Then we stopped in at an out-of-the-way Chinese buffet on a whim. $12.99 per person was exactly the kind of cheap meal we were after, and it was pretty dang tasty, to boot!
Happy anniversary! That sounds like an amazing, and full, scavenger day. Philly area food prices are just slightly higher than Pittsburgh! I don’t remember the last full-price meal I paid $12.99 for, let alone Chinese buffet.
Most of it was dry or canned goods that only expired within the last year, so it’s all still perfectly fine for eating. We figure it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $75-$125 of groceries. Not a bad haul!
There is a great app called Too Good to Go which we have discussed on these forums a lot in the last few months since Jay and Ryanne posted about it. Basically it allows you to buy expired or leftover food from local restaurants, bakeries and coffee shops for a steep discount. Each restaurants gets ratings too, so it is pretty easy to weed out the good shops from the bad. TGTG is not in the Pittsburgh area yet, but hopefully they expand out that way soon. You would love this app.
I had some strange luck earlier this year when our local Walmart marking down certain foods at huge discounts. Some were about to expire but others had a long expiration date and the packages looked undamaged. Picked up a few cases of organic extra dark chocolate bars for basically the price of Hershey’s.
we got three German & West Germany Cuckoo clocks for $10 a piece
I’d love to see these listings once you get them posted. This seems like a great bargain for older cuckoo clocks but sold listings are all over the place, probably because clocks must be a pain to ship and it is probably difficult to come up with a unique title. Do yours work or are they parts only?
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