We went to an antique show yesterday, held at a fairgrounds about an hour north of here. It was mostly outdoors which meant it was very chilly in the morning, but we were there five hours (there were 220+ dealers) and the day warmed nicely as it went along.
As with typical antique shops/shops, there were lots and lots of ‘crappy’ (to quote another attendee we overheard) items including kitchenware, clothing, tools, CD/DVDs, VHS tapes and miscellany like the above box of keys. Most of these we gave at best a cursory glance at and moved on.
We saw hunting/fishing gear as well as taxidermy and a fair amount of weapons and military collectibles (including Nazi items). Oh and lots (and lots!) of NASCAR items, toy cars and baseball stuff. Obviously I ignored all of that as well.
Fancy some teeth? They weren’t real, but they were creepy. We also saw leather goods with realistic eyes sewn into them, and a range of extremely weird and creepy dolls of alien fetuses. And lots of Halloween and Christmas goods as well.
I was of course looking for genre items, and many collectors had loads of it, including cases of opened stuff like the one above. The items on show ranged from damaged bootlegs to boxed pristine items from the 1980s. I saw many things I never expected to see at an outdoor antiques show in a small town in central NY.
Old electronics were in abundance, including this home 8-track player with a bunch of tapes. We saw several reel-to-reel and Super-8 players as well as what looked like a portable (very big and undoubtedly heavy) film projector!
Several dealers had Super-8 reels for sale, which I had never seen before. If I had money to burn it would have been fun to buy a player and some tapes for movie night!
There were loads of typewriters, telephones, kitchen electronics and cameras too, many of which I’m sure didn’t work. The above were seen at three dealers, and are examples of three different types of failed home camera systems. Even if you still owned a working camera that used Advantix film, I wonder could you get it developed?
The Colecovision came with a selection of prototype cartridges (it used to belong to a Coleco employee) and the Vic-20 was complete but the guy didn’t know if it worked (which means it likely didn’t). We saw a boxed TRS-80 as well.
While there were loads of console games for sale (especially XBox) computer software was almost nonexistent and the above were the only two I saw. The MS-Dos 6 was still sealed!
This thing was probably broken, and at the very least was missing a battery case cover. It’s intriguing, but I’m sure it’s a glorified calculator and most of the LED elements are probably long dead.
The above were an unexpected find: nearly mint copies of a Japanese entertainment magazine from the 1950s and 1960s. I don’t know much about these, but they were densely filled with photos of singers and actors and would I feel be of great interest to Japanese people on their advanced years. But how did they get to this particular antique show?
In the days before stores tracked frequent buyer credits electronically shops had these stamp books, and this one was full! Someone missed out on cashing this in for credit decades ago 🙂
And if they had maybe they could have picked up – in 1968 – a carton of Superman orange drink! This is an unused and I unassembled carton, and at 56 years old surely must be amongst the very few remaining in existence today?
When we visited the Frank Frazetta museum over the summer we saw examples of his distinctive style, but we didn’t see any works on black velvet! This homage by an unknown artist was an original piece after Frazetta’s famous Conan painting, and I daresay better than it had any right to be!
A lot of dealers had card for sale, and most of those were baseball cards. I saw some nonsport cards, and infrequently some (overpriced) Magic cards. One guy surprised me with boxes of graded Pokémon and Weiss Schwartz cards! Some of these were unreasonably expensive.
A ‘car with a brain’ it says, and the blurb suggests you program the car to drive along a specific route. Did it work? Maybe. Did it keep a child’s interest for longer than an hour? I’d say unlikely 🙂
The ET porcelain… thing… on the left was disturbing (and broken) but not one tenth as bad as the troll statue on the right. Both of these were about a foot tall.
Speaking of ET – and moving into retro licensed merchandise – one guy had an impressive selection of all sorts of stuff from the 1980s. If you liked ET or Star Wars you could have near-bankrupted yourself with his tables alone.
He had about a dozen different ones of these, as well as lunchboxes, craft kits, all sorts of books, pencil cases and many other examples of weird ephemera. It was refreshing to see so many items that were not the usual action figures, and brought me back to those heady days in the early 80s when shops were overran with Star Wars merchandise.
He also had dozens of Planet Of The Apes comics, and this was one of the cheapest. Although with a cover and title like that – not to mention it being the ‘Wildest ape adventure ever‘ surely this should have been the most expensive?
The mere existence of the brain teaser book on the left is noteworthy, but the Battlestar Galactica activity book struck a chord of memory in me, and I’m fairly sure I owned a copy back when I was a mere stripling. This one was in good condition, but most of the pictures had been coloured in and the puzzles and join-the-dots completed.
I had never seen a talking view master reel before. As you can see each reel has a tiny record attached to it, which suggests the viewers had a stylus inside to play them! Note that the record is transparent since it had to let light through so the slides could be viewed. Apparently this technology didn’t work well and was quickly replaced so the sound portion was on a separate cassette.
The above was astonishing: a set of Dick Tracy marbles (and yes, one is Madonna). Those of us old enough will remember that this film was licensed to an unreasonable level but was a forgettable turkey that rightly bombed. I’ve seen lots and lots of merchandise from this film over the years, but this was the first time I’d seen a set of marbles!
The colorforms set on the left was unopened (for over 40 years) and the right is a telephone! Australia wasn’t a big Star Trek market back in those days and we didn’t see much merchandise at all, but based on what I’ve seen over the years here a fan of the show hardly ran out of options in the USA.
And those options included jewelery! The necklace on the left is stylish and would look good around anyone’s next but that prosthetic/earring set on the left: why on earth was this ever manufactured? How big could the market have possibly been? Surely some company lost money on that one?
A Frisbee flying disc and a dress up costume. If I knew a McDonald’s fan I may have been tempted by either…
And speaking of costumes check out this lovely Gremlins mask from the 1980s, which I daresay looks very stylist on my strapping frame. This came in a box set with a (plastic) costume, and I hope someone bought it for their kid and somewhere there’s a little retro gremlin running around this Halloween!
The above shows my pickups – less a rubber stamp which you’ll probably get on a postcard one day. I got some goodies here, and the giant postcards are particularly nice.
What it doesn’t show was the last item referred to in the title of this post. For indeed, one of the many items shown in the 29 preceding photos was purchased for my brother for Christmas since I know he’ll love and treasure it. Can you guess which one?
