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Tea Cards

Saturday, July 15th, 2023

A few weeks back, on the way from fireworks shopping in New Hampshire, we stopped at a flea market in a field in ‘the middle of nowhere’. Imagine my surprise to find – amidst people selling their own unwanted stuff – two postcard dealers! Their cards were vintage and pricey, but I fell in love with a collection of tiny cards one guy had that had been distributed in packets of tea in the 1960s, so I made him an offer and walked away with the entire binder!

The cards were issued by a tea company called Brooke Bond, and in the USA and Canada came packaged in boxes of Red Rose (brand) tea. They were also issued in several other countries, and were most popular in England where 87 sets were issued over several decades!

The album contained 172 unique cards in eight different series. Six of the series (on birds, plants and butterflies) were for the US market, and two (transport and space) are Canadian. I also have dozens of doubles.

The cards are small – about an inch wide and two tall, and are beautifully printed with lots of information about the subject written on the back. Each series had 48 cards, and from what I can determine were available for a year each, so they would probably have been a challenge to collect!

The cards I have range from 1961 (Wildflowers of North America) to 1969 (The Space Age), which is about when they stopped including them in America (they continued until 1999 in England). They’re in incredible condition: some look like they came right off the press and it’s hard to believe they’re 60+ years old!

While these were inexpensive (I paid $25) I don’t plan on seeking out any more, and this will just live in my trading card collection (such that it is) as a lovely little curio from before I was born. As I said I’ve got a lot of doubles: if you want some let me know.

Coincidentally when I was in Australia I bought two cigarette cards from an antique shop. They were also inexpensive ($1) but were almost 100 years old (the above is from 1930) and I couldn’t resist them. They’re the same size as the tea cards, so this one will live in the same binder forever 🙂

Earlier today I went to what I believed was a local stamp show, but when I got there discovered was actually a postcard show! About a dozen vendors were there selling vintage (what I learned was before about 1963) cards to a room of people mostly older than me, but I found a few $0.25 bins of ‘modern’ cards and spent almost an hour sitting next to an elderly gentleman and chatting with him about his collection of 275,000 postcards!

I learned a lot, but perhaps the most amazing thing was that less than a half hour from our home is a postcard shop with 14 dealers selling all sorts of postcards from the 19th century through to modern times. Guess where I’m going next weekend?

Posted in Art, Collecting, Postcards, Retro | Comments Closed

Japan Pickups: Gamebooks

Thursday, July 6th, 2023

It was a bounteous trip to Japan as far as gamebooks were concerned, and I think I brought home more than ever before.

With the above 8 (the last one is Slaves Of The Abyss) I now have Japanese versions of 17 of their original run of 32 Fighting Fantasy (FF) books. These are all in great condition, and Crypt Of The Sorceror even includes a separate character sheet:

These were bought at Mandarake and Yellow Submarine, and all but Slaves were fairly inexpensive (<$20) by vintage FF standards.

Here we have Sorcery! books 3 and 4, which means I now own the complete original (1980s) and reprinted (2002) editions. The other set of books in the above pic is Clash Of The Princes, the unusual two-player FF gamebook set. I was extremely surprised to not only find this but to find it for so cheap (about $8) since I had no idea it had been released in Japan!

Speaking of, the above is a recent Japanese edition of the first FF novel. It’s as beautiful as the reprinted gamebooks and includes the original art. It seems the retro reprints of old FF material are continuing in Japan?

This book – about the same size and length as a typical FF – is a genuine oddity. Google translates the title to ‘How to play game books’ but it’s entirely FF focused (that cover art shows Livingstone and Jackson) and seems to be a collection of articles from the Japanese Warlock magazine as well as dozens of pages of complex gamebook maps! The pic on the right is part one of a four-part map for Starship Traveller.

Speaking of Japanese Warlock magazine, can you believe I found one. It was peeping out from between AD&D manuals in a Surugaya store in Akihabara, and only cost an astonishing ¥200! As you can see it’s issue 37 from 1990, which was after the last FF had been published in Japan.

It includes articles on game books, lots of (solo) Tunnels and Trolls content, several pages on computer RPGs – including two pages on Wizardry – and a fairly lengthy adventure that uses an unusual numbering system and seems to be about preparing for a new years celebration. Another fine acquisition for the collection, and I’m very relieved to have found it since it lessened the blow of Mandarake being unable to find the one they allegedly had in stock!

Lastly, I picked up this manga collection of articles from an RPG magazine on how to play Advanced Fighting Fantasy. Skimming through it with a translator it certainly seems aimed at women gamers, which may explain why AFF is shelved with Call of Cthulhu in Japanese shops? But the riddle of why ‘TRPGs’ are so popular with female gamers in Japan is probably a mystery best left for another time!

I bought a few other Japanese gamebooks as well, including examples from the Golden Dragon, Grailquest and Tunnels & Trolls series. I even saw others – an AD&D one, another based on the game Landstalker – that I passed on because they were pricey and not FF. As I said it was a bounteous trip as far as gamebooks were concerned, and I’d be surprised if I found this many again on a future trip.

Posted in Books, Collecting, Retro | Comments Closed

Japan Pickups: Wizardry (Part 2)

Tuesday, June 27th, 2023

I bought 38 books home with me from Japan, and the vast majority of these fell within two categories. Here we’ll look at the Wizardry books!

The above are guidebooks for the first Wizardry game. The left is for the NES release, and the right is more generic and covers the original version of the game, which the book itself reveals was released on the following systems:

Both of these guides are full of maps and tables and monster data, as well as detailed strategy on how to navigate the dungeons. They both seem like extremely useful guides to what is a famously difficult game.

I love also that the NES guidebook was obviously used by someone, as is evidenced by an attempt to complete some of the (partial) maps. This is also present in some of the other guidebooks shown here.

Here we have two different guides for the Famicom (since it was never released on the NES) version of the third Wizardry game. Why are there two? My assumption is simply that the license was granted to more than one publisher, especially since both of these contain official game art. The book on the right in particular is a beautiful tome, including not just screenshots of but also the official art of all the game monsters.

Here we have five guidebooks for the Game Boy ‘Gaiden’ games. As you can see I have three different books for the first game (Suffering Of The Queen) and one each for the second two. Once again these are impressive books (especially for their small sizes), chock-full of art and maps and tables and even featuring lots of color.

The above is a shot of how monster data is presented in the books for the first, third and first Game Boy games in the series. You can see how the books began to include official art, and then for the Game Boy versions the official art became the showcase!

I can still recall playing Wizardry VII when it came out, and I would have killed for a guidebook like the one shown above. It’s very thick (300+ pages) and seems loaded with game info but it also – based on adverts inside – seems to be one of four different guides for this enormous game! The book on right is the for the much-maligned Wizardry ‘adventure’ and is full-color and mostly screenshots. It’s a good way to get an idea of a game I’ll likely never play.

These two are a mystery. They are for the same game (seen in my previous post), and published by the same company within one month of each other. Both books seem more or less the same in terms of content (maps, guides, monster and item data etc.) but it’s presented differently in each (both are quite fancy and full of colored pages). It’s as if the same publisher published two unique guidebooks for the same game at the same time?!?

Here we have a Wizardry novel (based on the second game and published in 1990) and volume two of a Wizardry manga! There have been at least three manga series over the years, and I believe this one (from 1989) was the second.

The art is of-it’s-time, and based on an old review I found (and translated) online the story is derivative of other fantasy series that were popular in those days (like Lodoss War). I actually saw this entire series for sale (8 volumes) but it was pricey and (more importantly) very heavy so I didn’t buy it.

The last half-dozen or so pages of the manga contain this weird pseudo-magazine, which is itself referenced in a couple of the hint guides shown above. The Wizardry book rabbit hole seems to run deep!

If you were following my blog during the trip you may have seen a photo of the above. I hesitated at first due to its extreme cost, but on the last day I bought it since I didn’t want to regret. It’s a book from the official Wizardry ‘TRPG’ (think Dungeons & Dragons) which was released in Japan in the mid 1980s. From what I can tell this was a somewhat popular game, had quite a few books released, and has had two rereleases since.

The manual contains loads of material, including a few short adventures. It’s delightful to see it seems to be a literal translation of the game into a TRPG, with dungeon maps and monsters that resemble those from the games.

Speaking of the official Wizardry table-top game:

I saw these in January and regretted not buying them, so I was happy to see Mandarake still had the set! To my surprise it was still brand new and sealed. Of course I had to open it:

It’s five monsters ostensibly from the game series. They appear to be made from pewter, and are fairly detailed for their sizes:

I’ll never paint or even use them of course, but their fun treasures for my collection. You may have seen in my recent trip I saw another in this series, but the box for this set reveals that there were an incredible 24 sets of Wizardry miniatures?!?

It was fun finding and buying all the above during the recent trip. Yes some were pricey, but some weren’t as well. I’m positive I don’t even remotely have all the guidebooks for this series, but I probably have enough at this point. Now it’s time to dive into the GB versions and put some of these books to use 🙂

Posted in Books, Collecting, Games, Retro | 1 Comment »

Antiquing

Saturday, May 27th, 2023

These two days I went to two large antique shops, each with many dealers. When I was a snipe I thought antique shops were exclusively the domain of the ancient, but these days I find them interesting and even occasionally fascinating. These two I visited were particular great, and I saw many astounding things.

It’s a shame I don’t have luggage space/weight since one of these candy dispensers would have made a fine Christmas gift for Bernard. They actually had five of them in the shop, with one of them weirdly playing drums. These were a very unusual find by the way, since M&Ms aren’t exactly a beloved Australian brand.

One dealer had a large collection of 70+ year old bottles of fizzy drink that still had the drink in them. Many of these (which were very expensive) has visible growths in the bottoms, which were frankly disturbing. This same guy had a bunch of old beer cans for sale and I noticed some of them were also sealed.

Souvenir spoons used to be a thing, but you don’t see them for sale much (at all?) these days. I reckon most collectors have… ‘moved on’, and now the spoons are mostly scrap metal. One store had this large box full of them for a mere $1 apiece. Should I have bought one?

The View Master stuff was all very expensive, but some of the sets were still sealed. Alas, no genre stuff in this lot.

Both stores were full of royal stuff. You could fill a kitchen cupboard with all the plates and glasses and mugs but this enormous stein (?) stood out. It’s a beautiful item as you can no doubt see, but it was also scaled for giants and disturbingly close to life-sized.

Is the above an antique? Is it worth $80? Isn’t this just a piece of electronic waste you’d toss away without consideration? All valid questions, but an original iPhone recently sold for $55,000 so maybe this old thing is valuable too? In the same stand that sold this they also had a 1990 Tandy catalogue full of ancient computer tech that I already regret not buying.

The above jigsaw is simultaneously the best and worst item ever made, and from what I can tell was available only at Australian McDonald’s stores in 1998. It’s another item that I clearly should have purchased (for Bernard of course).

One of the dealers in yesterdays shop dealt in buttons, clothing patterns, weird old dolls and lots and lots of ‘Golliwogs’. There was a little sign that these were original ones made in the UK, but no disclaimer of sorts to apologize or justify the display of what are now very offensive items.

Speaking of which…

Yesterdays store had a lot of Nazi items. From weapons, to uniforms, to clothing (like the Hitler youth stuff above) to original documents. They had ‘collectible’ cards of Nazi officers, dinnerware from Nazi trains, and even a Nazi recipe book. It was – to be honest – a confronting site. I’ve never seen anywhere near this amount of stuff in a museum.

It was accompanied with a few notices that it was of historical interest, and disclaimers that the trade of such items helped keep the horrors of the nazis in the public conscience (which is a spurious claim at best). But I believe profiting from the darkest era of human history is repugnant and think that sale of such items (if it must happen at all) should probably be relegated to a less public forum.

Indeed, as I was in the second shop today I overheard the owners talking about how the Nazi items we saw yesterday will (apparently) soon have to be removed due to new laws. If so, I believe that is appropriate.

I don’t want to end this on such a dark note, so here’s a 1930’s tea set:

I don’t know why, but everything was tiny! You’d have trouble even squeezing an egg into the cups. Was this for children? It’s a shame I couldn’t get this and the queen stein in the same picture to contrast how under/oversized each was.

Oh and yes I did buy some items, but almost exclusively stamps and postcards, which means you may end up receiving examples in the mail 🙂

Posted in Retro, Trip | 1 Comment »

Newsagents

Thursday, April 13th, 2023

Let’s return to Charlestown Square, circa 198x. They hadn’t even started absorbing ‘Hilltop Plaza’ yet, and the ‘northeast exit’ (which no longer even exists in it’s then form) near Best & Less led out onto a sun-bleached concrete walkway around a Newsagent. That’s where I bought so many copies of Zzap64 and Commodure User and Smash Hits and even an issue or two of Warlock and Proteus. I can even remember where the magazines were in the store, and the exact path (clockwise) I’d walk around the enormous displays to choose what I wanted. This was before Lotto, and the place was dedicated to print media, was absolutely wallpapered with racks of magazines from all over the world, and had that exquisite ‘Australia newsagent smell’ that would take me right back were I to smell it now. It’s long, long gone now, living only in my memory. Has the age of the newsagent itself also passed?

These days, when I ‘go shopping’ (which is rarer than ever), I tend to visit a very specific set of shops: game shops, hobby shops, bookstores etc. There was once a time where newsagents was always included in this list. I remember as a youth, during the strolls down hunter street or the occasional day trips to Sydney, I would never walk past a newsagent without going in and (usually) buying something. As far back as I can recall there were magazines I would always buy, and even if the latest issue wasn’t available the newsagent was always a reliable place to grab a cheap drink, chocolate bar or bag of lollies.

When I came to America there was a lot of culture shock (“Why does bread taste so weird?”, “Why is everything so sweet?” are two I remember) and I can still recall being surprised by the lack of traditional newsagents. Magazines were of course sold, but the biggest racks were in grocery stores and paled in size to the average Australia newsagent. We occasionally visited a dedicated magazine shop in Rochester that had a massive selection, but it seemed wrong that the magazines I knew were still in print (mostly UK magazines) were mostly unavailable in my local shops.

Then the internet came along and changed the magazine industry forever. People stopped reading printed magazines, the number of available titles contracted, and as a result the magazine-sellers closed. Magazine racks in shops here in the USA diminished or disappeared entirely – my local grocery store for instance no longer sells any except for a small selection of gossip rags at the register. I used to still buy mags I was interested in at the bookstore Borders, but eventually it closed as well, and for a time things looked grim.

Thankfully Barnes & Noble stepped up, and (about a decade ago) our local one added an enormous magazine section that has served me well ever since. There’s endless talk of them closing and/or getting out of the magazine business (since almost all the mags they sell are imported from the UK) but so far, so good. It’s not the same as a newsagent though, and I sorely miss the type of shop I remember from my youth. Which is why I loved visiting Australia every year and going into the newsagents for a bit of nostalgia.

For about the last decade business was getting difficult for the Australian newsagent. Readership of magazines had declined, and it was becoming cost-prohibitive to import magazines from the UK and USA. Many newsagents were turning into gift shops or simply lottery vendors, and the magazine racks seemed smaller every time I visited the country. Then along came covid and it hit the humble local Australian newsagent like a juggernaut. When I was there last year I walked to three trusty newsagents only to find all of them were gone, and the few that remained barely sold any magazines. In the year since I have read about many closures, including a 100+ year old newsagent in South Australia (believed to have been the countries oldest) and a 60+ year old one in Newcastle. Apparently closures were accelerated in the last year by several Australian newspapers canceling their print versions, but the end result is that entire communities now have nowhere to buy magazines.

When newsagents are gone magazines will follow, which to this avid reader is a sad thing. But much like the vinyl renaissance I’ve read of upturns in the sale of books and even ‘dumb’ phones, and suggestions of the younger generations wishing to spend less time online. I hope that one day this leads to a magazine renaissance. Until then I suppose I’ll be content with memories of the newsagents of my youth, and my monthly B&N ‘magazine run’.

We all occasionally wonder about what we’d do if we could travel back in time, and I have said many times if I could step into 198x the first shop I’d go into would very likely be a newsagent. I’ll take this one step further and say it would be that exact newsagent I described in the opening of this entry. I wonder if they’ll have the latest issue of C+VG…?

Posted in Blog, Retro, Time | Comments Closed

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