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I came across a comment on Stampcommunity.org- someone had a 19th century pamphlet where the fold had an old sellotape repair. They were given an estimate of 750 dollars for removal and conservation, with a caveat that it could cost more and that it might not be successful.
Here’s me with a death pile of paper that needs conserving, such as a large 1970s etching by Nigerian artist Bruce Obomeyoma Onobrakpeya. Cost £4, estimated retail value £1,000, if someone hadn’t used a piece of fibreboard to frame it. There’s a dirty brown ring round the print, and straight through Bruce’s signature,
I was going to take this and other items over to a conservator in Brummagem. Kind of gone off the idea, thinking about a new career for 2025 🙂
It’s a race to the bottom. I came across a roadside “sorting office” in an industrial estate a couple of weeks back. People loading their cars and vans with parcels for delivery, that’d been dropped off in a car park by a lorry. I only use Royal Mail, but that’s in the process of being sold to a Czech oligarch.
Czech’s in the post…
Don’t know about the UPS dumpster, but the USPS one is in Atlanta. It’s where your parcel goes if you used those Chinese-made Forever stamps.
I’ve been sorting out three boxes-full of albums and loose stamps I bought at auction.
Found a complete set, plus extras, of the stamps issued by Equatorial Guinea to celebrate the Winter Olympics of 1972.Wishing everybody Merry Christmas and a great scavenging New Year!
This week’s haul- two large volumes on gardening from the 1850s, one book on house maintenance from the 1880s, two hiking maps from the 1930s and a Congolese mask for £20. The mask looks like an Eskimo, which I thought it was until Google Lens corrected me.
Auction house clears out stock and tools of a cycle shop, then employs a house-clearance firm to remove the left-over junk. That firm sells off anything of value, puts the rest into boxes and takes it to the Saturday flea market. Which is how I ended up with the bike shop’s vintage credit card imprinter. Also a kitchen bin half-full of 19th and early 20th-century postage stamps, someone’s prized collection of British Empire philately, that some vandal chucked into the bin. I think the latter must come from a defunct stamp shop, as the auctions have had quite a few somewhat damp-stained collections go through lately.
Must have been back in 2012 when I was talking with a British stallholder at the Newark Lincolnshire Antiques Fair. He had some Soviet posters and memorabilia, which he’d picked up in Crimea. He told me he’d bought property there, and was going to move there with his wife.
Two years later…
@jaepete The site of Verrey’s restaurant appears to be a Lacoste shop now, with a concrete crocodile chained to a rock outside.
Used to be able to get giblet curry for half-a-crown in a restaurant opposite Victoria coach station. Now you can’t even buy giblets to make your own.
Left a £40 bid on a large quantity of assorted books but got outbid by a couple of other bidders. I wasn’t able to inspect the lot in person, but seems to be mostly 1970s and 1980s non-fiction.
Took some books into the local thrift bookshop, including the two volumes of “With The Flag To Victoria” (after I removed all the dried wildflowers from its pages) and left with the first edition of this shoe-machinery catalogue. Cost £10; I think that was a good swap!
Well, definitely DNLF images of “Covenant”! On AbeBooks in the UK the two volumes of the first edition of “Pretoria” are £12.50 and then £19. Maybe the four-volume set includes what appears to be a sequel,”After Pretoria: The Guerilla War”.
Another book that turns up a lot is “The Great War Illustrated”, which is bound volumes of a weekly periodical issued from 1914 through to 1919. It’s a sanitised view of the war for the home market.
I picked up the two volumes of “With The Flag To Pretoria” on Saturday for a couple of pounds. That’s about the Second Boer War (the first is where the Boers introduced us British to guerilla warfare and commandos, the second is where we introduced the concentration camp). Pretty unsaleable. I knew that when I picked them out of a tray of household junk, but I still bought them ‘cos I’m an eejit.
A Great War book that turns up sometimes is “Covenants With Death”, a picture book from 1934, published by the “Daily Express” newspaper as an anti-war polemic. What’s the opposite of BOLO?
Think it was about ten years ago that I bought one of Cheshire for £5 and sold it to a dealer in an auction-room car park for £100. That was one of the large Saxton maps- this one seems to be a small version. Also nobody knows where Huntingdonshire is- I live 50 miles away and I’ve never been there! 🙂
Picked up a couple of 400-year-old county maps, framed, from a thrift shop on Monday for £20 the pair. These old county maps were all the rage in the 1980s when they were only 350 years old.
https://www.youtube.com/@shaunoliver1703
Deals in gold and silver coins, and some kind of weird postage-stamp arbitrage. Profit margins around 3% “over spot”,
https://www.youtube.com/@DavidHarperAntiques
Irritatingly enthusiastic TV personality.
