A long time ago, a pawn shop owner that we knew decided to go out of business and move to Central America. He sold off all of the stuff that was easy to sell and then gave the rest of the stuff to my sister to sell for him and send him half the proceeds. My sister sold off some more of the easy stuff and then got bored with it and gave me everything left to sell off on Ebay (since I was gainfully unemployed and actually enjoyed researching what some of these unmarked items were). I did that for about a year and found some really interesting stuff that no one knew what it was, i.e. an Olympic silver medal that was apparently never awarded from the 1908 Olympics in London.
We ended up selling that for somewhere over $3,000.
Most of the other stuff was nowhere near that valuable, so after a while my sister said to not worry about listing stuff anymore (since I started working a gig 2,500 miles away) and just keep whatever was left.
I pretty much forgot about the stuff that was left until I had to start cleaning out the garage in advance of our moving to a much smaller place. In my digging, I ran into 2 cardboard boxes filled with plastic bags filled with very old matchbooks. I'm not a collector for the most part, so I figured that I would pass them off to someone local by selling them on one of the local Facebook sale sites. I took a photo of the boxes and explained that these were mostly from the 30s, 40s, and 50s and put a price of $25 for both boxes - just to attract interested collectors who would realize what a deal they were getting. WRONG! I had several people who wanted me to unbag the several thousand matchbooks and then take photos of all of them before they would consider coming by to consider buying them. My response (that I didn't bother putting on Facebook) normally ends ....AND the horse you rode in on!
SOOOO... I decided to open one of the bags to see what I actually had. One of the first matchbooks that I saw was for a Cafe in Laguna Beach, CA. The cafe no longer exists, but as I was looking at it, I noticed the phone number - the phone number was 132.
The only one for sale like it on Ebay is $47.75!
Anybody know about these things? It looks like I might be going into the collectible matchbook business!
One more that I haven't been able to identify yet - this one comes from a resort from Palm Springs, CA that went out of business in the 50s. Here's a photo of the front:
While that looks like a swastika on the front, I believe that it is actually a Navaho symbol - but I'm guessing that if it is there, that this matchbook predates WWII.
Any information that anyone has will be greatly appreciated!
We ended up selling that for somewhere over $3,000.
Most of the other stuff was nowhere near that valuable, so after a while my sister said to not worry about listing stuff anymore (since I started working a gig 2,500 miles away) and just keep whatever was left.
I pretty much forgot about the stuff that was left until I had to start cleaning out the garage in advance of our moving to a much smaller place. In my digging, I ran into 2 cardboard boxes filled with plastic bags filled with very old matchbooks. I'm not a collector for the most part, so I figured that I would pass them off to someone local by selling them on one of the local Facebook sale sites. I took a photo of the boxes and explained that these were mostly from the 30s, 40s, and 50s and put a price of $25 for both boxes - just to attract interested collectors who would realize what a deal they were getting. WRONG! I had several people who wanted me to unbag the several thousand matchbooks and then take photos of all of them before they would consider coming by to consider buying them. My response (that I didn't bother putting on Facebook) normally ends ....AND the horse you rode in on!
SOOOO... I decided to open one of the bags to see what I actually had. One of the first matchbooks that I saw was for a Cafe in Laguna Beach, CA. The cafe no longer exists, but as I was looking at it, I noticed the phone number - the phone number was 132.
The only one for sale like it on Ebay is $47.75!
Anybody know about these things? It looks like I might be going into the collectible matchbook business!
One more that I haven't been able to identify yet - this one comes from a resort from Palm Springs, CA that went out of business in the 50s. Here's a photo of the front:
While that looks like a swastika on the front, I believe that it is actually a Navaho symbol - but I'm guessing that if it is there, that this matchbook predates WWII.
Any information that anyone has will be greatly appreciated!
