Robot Claw

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 🙂