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Great find in that junk drawer needle cartridge!
Here’s a real photo postcard dating from WWII of a platoon of German army soldiers. What’s interesting is that most of them are carrying non-German captured rifles. It was not uncommon for Germany at the time to use and reissue captured equipment, even if the ammunition was different, but not something I’ve seen in postcards or period photos before. It made this otherwise mundane group portrait much more desirable. It was $3 at a gun show and sold for $17 plus first class package shipping.
I ran across this Shore Moisture Meter for bulk grain at the flea market being sold by a tool guy. I didn’t even know what it was but it looked interesting. We chatted about it a bit; he showed me how it works, said that it sells for a lot on eBay and that he wanted $100 for it. When a seller mentions eBay we all figure it’s time to walk away but I took note that he did not specifically say that it sells for $100 on eBay. I did not press him further on the pricing but looked it over and told him that I would text some pictures to a friend of mine to see if he wants it. That gave me an excuse to pull out the phone and surreptitiously look it up on Terapeak. Excited but trying to look nonchalant, I pulled out 4 – $20’s to wave at him and said “yeah he wants it but he’ll only pay $80.” He took it. It sold for $500 with free shipping on a best offer after a couple months listed.
Here’s a consignment challenge coin that was a bit obscure so I had to wait for the right person who’d be willing to pay $73 plus shipping for it on a best offer, though it’s not in the best condition. It’s from Joint Task Force Noble Anvil, Allied Force Kosovo, dating from 1999.
College yearbooks have never sold well for me but I do have luck with something relating to a smaller college that’s not too old. This illustrated history of Hollins College from 1973 was $1 at an estate sale and sold for $26 with free media mail shipping.
10/17/21 – 10/23/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 409
Items Sold: 18
Gross Sales: $407.80 (what the buyers paid, not incl shipping or taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $59 plus shipping – 1990’s reissue 1/25 scale car model kit ($4 at the flea market).
Returns: 0
COGS: $94.68 (including consignment commissions but not including original cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 19
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0A goodly number of sales last week, for me, so I felt like I was “in the shipping business” as Jay referred to it. Many low dollar items but I do stick to smalls, though, when it comes to anything selling for under $20 so those only take a minute to ship. I did spend 40 minutes packing up a 15 lb vintage camcorder dive housing (double wrapped, used a whole bag of peanuts and had to make a Frankenbox) that was an unpleasant reminder of how much I hate shipping big items. The irony was that the darn thing was not fragile at all but had arms and things sticking out that would have destroyed the box from the inside during shipment given its weight if not packed well. And I had to make a special trip to drive it to a FedEx drop off. Grumble grumble!
Congrats on the super week! For letter-sized, non-machinable (stiff) flat items up to 3 oz not more than ¼” thick I send low value items to Canada for $2.13 using stamps. Has to be an envelope (I use the cardboard 6.5×4.5); can’t be a bubble mailer or poly bag. There is no tracking but I’m willing to take the hit in that range if the buyer says they didn’t get it.
I have 5 heading to Australia that seem to be stuck
Both Priority Mail and First Class Package are still suspended for Australia and New Zealand. USPS says they are returning to sender anything they have but it could take a while. They are under serious lockdown. A friend is a FedEx pilot who takes international routes and was recently in Sydney. He told of having a police escort everywhere and being locked in his hotel room with a guard in the hall.
You’re welcome! I can’t resist a mystery so I used Google app on my phone to capture your Imgur photo and it came right up in results. BTW, the Google photo search works exponentially better on my phone than on the desktop.
I have been getting lots of emails and interest in stuff from buyers asking detailed questions, but then they disappear…
I get many of those, often about something clearly already in the photos, condition, or description. My theory is that they are fishing for the seller to reply with an offer.
10/10/21 – 10/16/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 408
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales: $210.76 (what the buyers paid, not incl shipping or taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $40 plus shipping – Lot of 2 Dept of the Navy Dinner China Bouillon Cups (from a lot that came to $1.25/item).
Returns: 0
COGS: $31 (including consignment commissions but not including original cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 41
$ Spent on New Inventory: $230.15The two bouillon cups noted as top sale had the mystery backstamp that I posted here and could never identify but it didn’t seem to matter.
Advertising figure for Supertrim detergent, Italy, by Paul Campani. “Pupazzo Angelino” or just Angelino, 1960-1969. Might have had a cartoon, too.
no one is going to be able to find any postcards under just those two sections
And the distinction between those two subcategories is by no means clear. EBay seems to have come up with its own definition of the word “topographical”. Postcards in Landscapes/Mountains and Roads and Highways subcategories will go to non-topographical even though they are topographical by any definition. And any postcard in a place-name subcategory will go to topographical which doesn’t make sense. Even among postcard collectors there is not a very definitive line to categorize a topographical postcard. Non-collectors looking for a card will presumably use the dictionary definition of the word topographical, which is simply relating to physical features of an area. So the distinction between eBay’s two subcategories will be useless with everyone defining it differently. They may as well have gone to a single category. It’s insanity.
I use it all the time now. It is within the Google app on iPhone, so it is not a separate app (anymore?). There is a little camera icon in the Google app search box. For an image search, I find it to be significantly better than loading an image into Google on the desktop for a search. I think the advantage is being able to crop to the item on the phone to search. I have been able to identify some mystery items that I have trying to ID for a long time. At the same time, I have to admit that it sometimes seems to decide what type of thing it’s looking for and defaults to showing only those items. For example I was trying to identify a folding pocket knife with a distinctive handle and all it wanted to show me was jewelry of a similar design. I wish you could use a key word with the picture to point it in the right direction.
It also gives me much better and more informative results when scanning bar codes than the QR Reader app that I have been using.
10/3/21 – 10/9/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 378
Items Sold: 13 Gross Sales: $537.92 (not incl shipping or taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $255 plus shipping – USS CONSTITUTION 74<sup>th</sup> Commanding Officer’s challenge coin on consignment, at auction.
Returns: 0
COGS: $157.55 (including consignment commissions but not including original cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 9
$ Spent on New Inventory: $175.35A much better week for me than last. Scavenge of the week: A large lot of sealed vintage 1/25 scale car model kits at the flea market for $4 each. There were just a couple on a dealer’s table that were marked $10 each when I started looking at them. When he said he had a bunch more I channeled Jay and said “how much do you want for all of them?” And the haggling started in earnest. Some decent scores I made sniping this week are runners up.
Sorry; sometimes Imgur messes with me. Let’s try that hammer head photo again:
Well, a new voice is heard from! Great job, Stephanie! The few clothing items I have listed sit and sit on eBay. I obviously need to rethink my decision not to use any other platforms. Some recent sales of mine:
I had a couple of these vintage engineer field notebooks. There’s a little technical content but they mostly contain just specially ruled pages. One was a straight field book and the other was a mining transit book. I got them in a large free lot and they sold for $13 each plus shipping to the same person.
After some surprising successes I have tried to keep an eye out for older kitchen items. This vintage aluminum bacon press with wooden handle was $1 at a yard sale and sold for $25 with free shipping that cost me $4 (first class package).
Here’s something else I watch for – old hammers (or hammer heads without handles). There are many different types of hammers and some are very collectible. Unfortunately the most active collectors seem to be in the UK so one has to keep that in mind when pricing them. This vintage boiler scaling hammer head was out of a large free lot and sold for $13 plus the buyer paid $25 for shipping to the UK.
This US Navy cruise book commemorating the 1971 – 1972 activities of USS LEXINGTON and available for sale to crew members at the time was a book sale find for $5. It sold for $80 plus shipping. Years ago US Navy cruise books could be picked up cheaply on eBay until a couple sellers decided to make a market in them by buying them all up, listing them at very high prices ($200 – $500), and sitting on them. The market is finally catching up but LEXINGTON was a WWII-vintage aircraft carrier that was serving as a training ship in the ’70s and not very desirable so I was happy with what I got.
It is amazing! I just got an ID on three different mystery objects I was getting ready to post here. (It unfortunately did not reveal anything useful with that Navy cup backstamp I was trying to identify.)
Is the opening of the dish about 8 3/4″ in diameter? If so, the “22” indicates a size of 22 centimeters. Then it would be of European origin, possibly Eastern Europe where a lot of the old enamelware stock in antique stores comes from.
I don’t recognize the logo and I’ve never seen any compilation of enamelware logos though I’ve seen the numbers under various logos before like this, indicating the size of the opening in centimeters.
