Scrapbooks often have no context. They may have been busy work for bored children or more possibly a reflection on the fascination of high quality color illustration. How could you just throw away such high quality art when the magazines pile up? They couldn't - so we find scrapbooks like these from the 30's and get a look at images commissioned by advertisers to leap off the page as if real.
from Instagram
The odds and ends you see... Rocket Chalk. The age of rockets and the promise of space travel added sleek shapes and fins from cars to Chalk? No fins here, but with rocket Chalk you won't stay long after school writing "I will not drive by an estate sale." 100 times. Seen at my friend's - Windy Cats Estate Sales in Brookfield, CT.
The annual Friends of the Newtown Library Book sale is a Mecca for book collectors, avid readers and me. There is always a selection of ancient tomes of all sizes and old paper to choose from. This pulp science fiction title was strangely prophetic.
from Instagram
Prismacolor obsession. At the estate sale sneak peak I conducted recently, I found a set of older prismacolor pencils and decided to buy and then display them with the 2 other eras of these magical sticks. Newest at the top oldest at the bottom. I don't know how old. Getting ready to color...with them.
One item I learned is that, no surprise, the older ones are better than the newer ones. If you ask around to fans of the pencils many will tell you that now they are made in Mexico they break more often. I have made no empirical study to verify this - but I will tell that now I have another excuse to buy old pencils when I see them at sales - like I needed an excuse!
Two worlds collide again! While traveling to March Farm in Bethlehem, CT to pick cherries with the family, I happened on another good pick. When you ride through the hills of Connecticut you will eventually come across the make-shift yard sale. Sometimes these are just home goods and toys - the typical we-have-too-much-stuff sale. Every so often you come across an old farm property where the stuff they have too much of is very old.
This day it would be the latter. With a little convincing I was able to bring the family trickster to a rest and assure wife and daughter that I wouldn't be long. This was one of the few times where I could be close to honesty regarding their wait time. While I could have spent half an hour, it really only took a few minutes to take it all in. The grand prize was a table full of farm journals from the 1930's. I wanted all of these for the ads alone, but managed to hold off and chose just 3.
The Famous Artists School was a Correspondence course in drawing, Cartooning and other skills- the founders were actually famous artists, illustrators, cartoonists in the biz. I have the over sized set of binders that hold the course work and every now and then I find something else from there. Born out of the Artist colony in Westport CT they also published this magazine quarterly. This one is from 1959 and features an illustration of Westport on the cover. I like it.
Another production still from unknown origin. There seems to be an early 60s military informational vibe with all of them, except maybe this one. See if you can figure out what's going on and who is behind it.
Wanna know how I find all those bizarre cool and unique things I post? If you're in Connecticut stop by the Brookfield library- the show starts at 7pm.
When 2 of my worlds collide...this estate sale treasure of a book from 1935 on how to cartoon also had play money from 1947 tucked in the pages. That's a a 2fer.
from Instagram
Every weekend is another opportunity to not only search for gold, but also provide a useful service to humanity. My good friend Justin Krul (of Just-In Antiques and More!) advertised an estate sale in Sandy Hook CT (still going on as this is being written). My initial scan of the home found it to be extremely well set-up and very clean. My first discovery were some cool albums
My plan is always to make a 2nd and 3rd inspection and each time to look deeper and deeper into the house (with permission). My goal is to find what was missed, the hidey-holes and cubbys that we all consider as safe places...so safe, we forget about them.
A common place to hide items is above ceilings - so much dead space and flat surfaces they are hard to resist. This is where I come in. In this sale I was able to uncover valuables the owner would have left to the next buyer, or whoever may have stumbled across them. Watch this short dig report and see the discover as it happened...
The epilogue is: Justin returned the items to the owner and they were ecstatic and confessed that her father would often hide these things before going away on a trip. This happy ending to the story is what makes Urban Archeology so satisfying to me.
