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Welcome to a page dedicated to bringing the marble collectors in the nation with current and real marble stories. Anything that I find I will add it here with the exact date of the piece along with the author. If you wrote something at one time in your life and it was published feel free to email or mail me the writing and I will include it on The Marble Dealer page. My email is always open mikesmarbles@yahoo.com

(Update: Check below for the article titled The World's Priciest Marbles by Mike Smith October 13, 2011)

Marbles players shooting for a tournament win by Michael Donahue Tuesday, November 20, 2001.

Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 may be the games of choice among most teenagers but Tyrus Kearney, 15, prefers a simpler kind of fun. All the Memphis, Tenn., teen has to do is draw a circle on any surface concrete, sand, dirt or clay and the game begins. Kearney's passion is marbles, a game that hasn't changed much since Kearney's father, who also plays was a boy. "When I'm doing this I have to use my mind, use strategy and get the clay to work," said Kearney as he demonstrated some thumps on a ring beneath a big blue and yellow tent at the recent Marble Festival, during International Goat Days in Millington, Tenn. Kearney, a high school sophomore, began throwing marbles when he was 6 or 7.

He is a member of the Memphis Thumpers marble club and a three time champion of the Memphis Marble Association. He likes to spend his prize money which sometimes is as much as $50.00, on clothes. Thomas Mead, Kearney's father, is president of the Memphis Marble Association, a group of 12 marble thumpers who compete in tournaments. A game of marbles is played with at least four people. There are 13 marbles in the middle of the ring in a "T" or cross formation. Each player has a "thumper" or marble that's used to knock out seven of the 13 marbles. How many marbles each player knocks out determines who is the winner and the runner up. The game is similar to pool, Mead said. "You're using your thumb and hand and your concentration. You're just doing it with your hand and not with a stick and a hand." Mead explained how to thump or "shoot," as it used to be called in the old days.

"You put it (the marble) between your thumb, your index and your point (middle) finger. You get it set between that point finger and index finger with your thumb behind the marble. And then you use thrust power from your thumb. "The thrill of it is to make perfect hits. I have seen some thumpers take a marble and make it just automatically hit the marble, (make it) bounce back to another position and just sit there." The game of marbles has been around some time. In "Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things," Charles Panati writes, "It is clearly displayed that many games played today were enjoyed by children 500 years ago. And several of those games, one being marbles, were part of the daily play of Egyptian children 4,500 years earlier." And, he writes, "On the Greek island of Crete, Minoan youths played with highly polished marbles of jasper and agate as early as 1435 B.C. And it is the Greeks, from their term for a polished white agate, marmaros, who gave us the word 'marble."

Marble playing is growing in popularity, said Jim Ridpath, president of the National Marble Club, based in Myrtle Beach, S.C. There are about 1,100 members from the United States and nine foreign countries in the club. Ridpath, 79, began a class on how to play marbles and "it grew beyond my imagination," he said. "We started teaching kids how to play marbles who didn't have the opportunity to learn. When I was growing up, we always learned from older kids. But those kids are not really playing that much today 'cause they don't have the space. There used to be an empty lot on every corner. You don't find that now, at least in the larger metropolitan areas." The secret to being a good marbles player is to practice, Ridpath said, adding that the game of marbles is like the game of life. "It teaches you how to win and/or lose. If you can't lose right, you can never win right. It teaches you how to act on your own. It's not like playing football. If you fumble the ball, you've got 10 guys trying to cover for you. In marbles, if you make a mistake, you've got to live with it."

Young rollers go old school at tournament Before PlayStation, or even TV, marbles were all the rage

The gentle click and snap of childhoods long past floated into Akron's present Saturday morning as two dozen boys and girls competed in a marbles tournament. This was the diversion of summers without air conditioning, a contemporary of jacks and hopscotch, tag and steel roller skates, of a country with only one major sport — all pursuits that favored open air and daylight. "Keep that hand Super Glued to the ground," advised Michael Cohill, borrowing modern language to train a new generation. The game of marbles was once so pervasive that it generated terms still with us, though cut off from their roots. "Knuckle down" would have been the admonition that Angelo Ciavarella heard when he "played for keeps" back in the 1930s. He provided hushed play-by-play and color commentary Saturday as his granddaughter, Lea, tried her hand in the tournament, which was at the city's Lock 3 Park. Lea, 9, goes out for "every sport that conies up," her grandfather said with pride. But that doesn't give her the time or the devotion he had as a boy. "When we went to school we always had marbles in our pocket," he said, and they played along the way. That gave them better aim and power than today's players, he said.

Ciavarella gave it up when he entered high school in 1940, the traditional cut-off. Up to that time, it was a natural pursuit for any Akron child because the city was the marble capital of the United States. Cohill, who has become a latter day apostle for the game, said he has found evidence of 32 manufacturers in the Akron area. Now he is the only one, having undertaken the making of the little spheres this year. The peak years might have been the '30s, he said, with a near-fatal decline by the 1950s. In 1931, 60,000 Akron children participated in the local competition. His theory is that the game became displaced by today's more available organized sports and electronics, including TV. Today Mexico City is a marble Mecca, he said. "Keep in mind, marbles is demographically driven because it's so inexpensive." Thus, Mexico generates more marbles in a day than the United States does in a year, he said, and a single plant in Guadalajara produces a billion a day. Cohill's fledgling operation, with two assistants, is good for a few hundred — when the glass-heating furnace works. At 50, "I'm no good," Cohill says of his own skills, but admits he is not a lifetime player. Still, he has acquired the knowledge of many lifetimes, after an earlier toy-making venture got him interested in marbles.

He had a small Akron factory that made plastic outdoor toys in the 1980s, but he found that it had been the site of a marble plant that traced its lineage to the 19th century. Since then, he has interviewed old-timers and immigrants for a truly global view of the game. Moses probably played the game, Cohill said, and they were found in King Tut's tomb. Americans still favor a ring game, in which contestants try to drive marbles out of the ring with a shooter. It was conceived as a promotional device by Scripps Howard, which once published newspapers in many U.S. cities — including several in Ohio. Other forms favored around the world include target games, in which the objective is just hitting something, and hole games, where the objective is to hit or avoid a hole. Saturday's winners were Monica Feltman, 7, of Akron and Steven Randby, 14, of Ravenna. Each won a trip to Disney World.

• Aggie — Marble made out of agate or glass that looks like agate, a natural mineral.

• Ante — Where players start by placing into the ring an equal number of marbles or marbles judged to be of equal value.

• Bullseye — Popular design that refers to China marbles and natural-agate marbles.

• Keepsies — The name of the game: Playing for keeps. Keep all the marbles you win.

• Knuckle down — To have one knuckle of your shooting hand touching the ground.

• Lagging — Similar to determining the break in pool, it's a way of choosing who shoots first. Players roll marbles toward a line in the dirt (lag line). Whoever gets closest without going over shoots first.

• Mibs — Target marbles. Another name: Kim-mies. A mibster is one who plays marbles.

• Pee Wee — A marble no more than V2-inch in diameter. Thought to be the namesake of New York Yankees' Hall of Famer Pee Wee Reese.

• Playing for keeps — Winner keeps all marbles after the game ("winner keeps, loser weeps").

• Shooter — Marble shot from the hand in game play with the object usually being to knock a target marble out of play. Shooters often are slightly larger than target marbles.

Marble collectors get fired up about last special run at factory

By Michael Sangiacomo, The Plain Dealer

May 25, 2010, 12:00AM

They are spit from a furnace built in 1932, and tumble through a series of parallel rollers and come out the other end as perfect spheres -- one-inch marbles.

"These are very, very rare," said David Tamulevich, eyeing the large tan marbles. But what really excited Tamulevich and his friends were the tiny specks of color that made the marbles resemble bird's eggs.

"We haven't seen anything like that in decades," said Tamulevich, from Ann Arbor, Mich. He and two dozen other marble collectors from around United States and Canada traveled to Jabo Inc. near Marietta, the last marble factory in Ohio.

Jabo master craftsman David McCullough came out of retirement to make one more run of the large marbles using the old kiln he declared ready for the scrap heap a year ago.

After years of begging by Steve Sturtz, a marble collector who splits his time between Alexandria Bay, N.Y., and Kingston, Ont., McCullough agreed to fire up the old furnace again, but with no guarantees how long it would hold up.

A small group of collectors put up $50,000 to make the run and gathered at the factory to pitch in. By the end of a long day that started at 4 a.m. Monday, the furnace was running fine. They planned to return Tuesday to finish the job -- a total of 120,000 marbles.

Jabo is a no-frills operation that is barely hanging on, manufacturing small industrial marbles, uniformly blue or green. But McCullough gets excited when he gets to make the colorful marbles.

"All these people have invested a lot of money to allow me to come in and play," he said. "I'm retired, but I love coming back in for runs like these."

"The marbles are all right," he said. "The colors are not quite what I imagined they'd be. But then, I'm always dissatisfied. I want to make the perfect marble. I have no idea what it looks like, but I'll know it when I make it."

The collectors call McCullough an artist and say no one makes marbles like he does. He smiles and deflects the praise.

The collectors will finish the marble run Tuesday, let them cool, and divide them up on Wednesday.

"We really should wait longer," said Sturtz, noting that the marbles are more fragile when they are hot. "But they should be cool enough by then."

The marbles roll off the machine at 2,400 degrees, hotter than lava. It's impossible to tell a hot marble by sight, but if touched, they will "burn to the bone."

They could easily make back their original investment, but the group members have agreed to not sell them for years. They've already spotted numerous marbles so unique that they would fetch more than $100 each in auction.

Most said they are happy to exhibit the marbles in their private collections and keep them as reminders of their youth or simpler times.

"But when word gets out, you can bet collectors will be hounding us for these," said Eric Hunt of New York City.

Brian Rogalin, of Belleville, N.J., said it's hard to describe what makes one marble more valuable than another.

"But you know it when you see it," he said. "It's like trying to describe what makes a woman beautiful."

David McCullough, owner of Jabo, Inc. and glass artist, looks through a bucket of hot marbles to check their color and decide what changes to make during a one inch marble run on Monday, May 24, 2010. It is the first time this machine has been fired up since 2007. Investors and collectors put up money so that McCullough could create more of his unique collectible marbles. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

These one-inch speckled marbles are the first batch from the special run at Jabo marble factory in Reno, OH. Investors and collectors made it possible to restart the furnace and run a machine that had not been in use since 2007. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

Tony Banas of Connecticut, left, and Bobby Newman of Texas talk marbles as they watch the first run of one-inch marbles come down the shoot at Jabo marble factory in Reno, OH on Monday, May 24, 2010. The men are collectors and investors in the run. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

Ron Ewers uses a steel rod to clean the aperture of the tank. He is pulling the hot glass on top through the cold glass on the bottom to get things flowing. Ewers has worked at Jabo marble factory for 11 years. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

David McCullough, owner of Jabo, Inc. and glass artist, adjusts the rate a color rod melts into the base glass during a one-inch marble run on Monday, May 24, 2010. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

Marble collector and investor Steve Sturtz hangs outside near the furnace at Jabo marble factory, waiting for the marble artist, David McCullough, to show up for an early morning marble run on Monday, May 24, 2010. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

David McCullough, owner of Jabo, Inc. and glass artist, adjusts how quickly a color rod melts into the base glass during a one-inch marble run on Monday, May 24, 2010. It is the first time this machine has been fired up since 2007. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

A Jabo marble furnace is fired up for the first time since 2007 early Monday morning, May 24, 2010. A small propane fire is burning to heat up glass rods to add color to the marbles, so that cold glass is not introduced to hot glass. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

Hot marbles, the first to be produced from this furnace at Jabo, Inc., in Reno, Ohio, since 2007, fall into a bucket lined with heat pads to keep them from cooling too quickly and breaking. Collectors are eagerly awaiting this run of marbles. Several of them are investors who made this latest marble run possible. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

An interview with Antique Marble Collector Alan Basinet! (June 8th 2009, Collectorsweekly.com)

Alan Basinet talks about collecting antique marbles, noting various design styles, manufacturers, production methods, and the regions they came from. He can be contacted via his website, marblealan.com.

Like most kids growing up in the late ’60s, early ’70s, I played with marbles. Of course I grew out of it, but I carried those good memories with me. Skip forward some years, and I was working in my previous profession as an archaeologist. Most of the sites that we investigated were pre-Columbian, mostly here in Florida. When we started to work on one site in downtown Jacksonville where I live, I began finding a lot of marbles.

This was a part of town that’s sort of a slum now but was an early settlement right up to the Civil War. We were looking for the oldest historic evidence of human occupation there, but we kept finding all these clay marbles. Some were glazed, some were painted. I had never seen anything like that before, so I began doing research. I discovered that children had been playing with marbles for centuries and that there was a lot of variability over the years in how marbles were made. Some of them are quite spectacular-looking.

So that slowly evolved into a hobby, which slowly evolved into a business, which eventually took over so much of my time that I gave up my profession in archaeology to pursue selling marbles. I’ve been doing that for just over 10 years now. I am lucky to have managed to make a living out of it. A lot of that owes to the fact that I got onto eBay almost as soon as it came around. I discovered the marble niche early on, filled it, and I have been able to maintain an edge ever since.

There are so many different types of people that collect marbles. Generally the hobby attracts some wonderful people, which has been nice because I’ve been in other collectible areas before where the collectors and the dealers were a little more intense or a little more jealous. Marble collectors seem to be able to get together and just enjoy showing off their treasures.

Collectors Weekly: Do you specialize in a specific type of marble?

Basinet: Not really. As far as selling goes, I’ll sell any type of marble that’s consigned to me. Some of the earliest marbles are made out of stone and clay. With a few exceptions, those don’t tend to be as collectible as the glass marbles from the 1850s. Handmade glass marbles are some of the most collectible, but the 20th century, machine-made marbles, mostly from America, are perhaps some of the most popular marbles on the market right now. There are still some companies that produce marbles here in the U.S., and there’s a very large company in Mexico as well.

People are still making and collecting machine-made marbles. Over the past 20 years, particularly in the last 10 or so, artists working with glass have turned their attention to making art glass marbles. Since the late ’90s, it’s become a major part of the market. The only reason you would call them “marbles” is because they happen to be round and made out of glass. Some of these handmade modern marbles are 6 inches in diameter. Of course they’re not meant to be played with, but they provide collectors with some beautiful objects to acquire. I can’t even begin to express how talented some of these people are.

The earliest glass marbles were generally made by creating long canes that would have a clear or transparent-colored base surrounding tiny rods of colored glass. The molten blob would be pulled to create a slender cane that might be 20 to 50 feet long. The cane would be heated until it was maleable enough to be twisted and cut at one end with marble scissors, which were created around 1846 and had a little cup on them that would help form the hot glass into a perfect sphere.

Handmade marbles can be intentified by their rough ends, which we call pontils. That’s how most people identify handmade vs. machine-made marbles. Even though they might be in mint condition and never played with, they’re going to have little, rough ends from where they were cut off the cane.

Almost all of the early handmade marbles were made in Germany. The Germans really had the marble market locked down. They made a lot of glass toys, particularly in the Thuringen portion of the country. But when World War I began, we embargoed anything coming out of Germany, so Americans were no longer able to get glass marbles they were making, which spurred Americans into looking at alternative methods of creating marbles. Through a series of patents, the marble-making machine was perfected. Marbles were no longer required to be made by hand. The process could be fully automated and they could pump out millions of marbles a day.

Collectors Weekly: Were there also handmade American marbles?

Basinet: There were a few. There are some types of marbles that a lot of collectors call transitionals. For example, there were a number of glassworks in and around Akron, Ohio that came into being in the the 1890s. They pretty much all made the same type of marble by gathering molten glass on the end of a rod. We call these hand-gathered marbles. They rounded the gathered glass with machinery, so it was partly handmade and partly machine-made, thus the term transitional.

The first company that produced marbles almost entirely by machine was M.F. Christensen & Son Company of Akron. They went out of business in 1917. Around that same time, another company called Akro Agate began business in West Virginia. Once they came into being, all these smaller companies came about, mostly along the Ohio River in West Virginia. Throughout the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, tons of marbles were being produced. This was when marble playing as a hobby was at its apex .

In terms of collectibility, a lot of those marbles are still around, especially from the ’30s and later. Some of them can be quite valuable because they were rare to begin with, but most collectors look for marbles that have the least amount of damage. That can be problematic since they were made as toys and were played with by children. To find old marbles in mint condition can be very challenging. Some marbles from the mid-1800s can go for thousands of dollars apiece if they’re in mint condition because they’re so rare.

Collectors Weekly: Were Germany and America the only two big centers making marbles?

Basinet: Almost entirely. But marbles began being produced in Japan as early as the 1930s. After World War II, when Japan was still occupied by the U.S., they began creating their own marbles. It didn’t take long for the Japanese marble industry to almost completely wipe out the American marble industry because they were producing marbles so cheaply and in such great numbers that Americans just couldn’t keep up. They’re the ones that popularized the cat’s eye. American companies made some cat’s eye marbles, too, but almost all Japanese marbles were cat’s eyes, and that was waht children really wanted.

Around the same time, the company from Mexico that I mentioned began creating machine-made marbles. You can even find marbles that were made in Czechoslovakia.

Collectors Weekly: Was there machine-manufacturing in Germany as well?

Basinet: Yes, but we don’t know much about it. Before the Berlin Wall came down, the region of Germany originally making the most handmade marbles was in Communist hands, so there was very little contact between people living over there and the West. We know that they began making machine-made marbles in Germany in the ’30s and throughout the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, but there are none being made in Germany now, except for a few artists who carry on the tradition of handmade marbles.

There’s one guy over there making marbles today whose forbearer actually invented the scissors that allowed marbles to be cut from canes, so he’s got a direct connection. His ancestors settled that part of Germany in the late 1500s when they began making glass toys over there. It’s all pretty fascinating and has a lot of history behind it, but most collectors just enjoy the color and beauty of the marbles.

Collectors Weekly: Were the first marbles in Germany glass or other types of materials?

Basinet: The earliest marbles were actually made by the Dutch and they were made from stone like limestone that was ground into spheres. If you go further back, teh ancient Romans and Egyptians made glass spheres, but I wouldn’t exactly call these marbles other than they share the trait of being made out of glass and they’re round. I’m not really sure what games they were used for. The actual marble game was invented by the Dutch in the 1500s and 1600s.

In fact, the term “marble” came from those that were made from marble, even though those are very difficult to find and they’re not really valuable because basically it’s just a rock. They’re interesting historical pieces, but people don’t pay big money for them. So the Dutch began making marbles from stone first, and then the Germans followed, making marbles from a form of agate.

In the early or mid-1800s, people began making marbles from clay, using different firing processes to make different types of marbles. Some would be low fired and maybe not even dyed or painted when they were done. They’re just like little plain brown balls of fired clay, not too attractive, and I’m sure they were cheap for the children back then. Others were glazed, sometimes with designs on the surface, and were intended for the more affluent children of the day. We don’t see as many of those as we do like the common clays.

Then there are marbles that we call scenic chinas that have a high-fired white earthenware base with a glaze on the surface (the earliest ones were burnished without a glaze) depicting scenics and ships. There are literally only a handful of those known to exist, and when they come up for sale, they usually go for $10,000 and above

Collectors Weekly: Were marbles always made for children’s games?

Basinet: Almost always. Some of the early handmade marbles are more than two inches in diameter, particularly those from about 1850 to 1870. They were made for adult games like carpet bowling, a game that was very much like today’s bowling, but played on the carpets of Victorian houses. Some of the larger handmade glass marbles were also used for that purpose. Generally speaking, any marble made that was under an inch was produced for children’s games.

Collectors Weekly: Who are some of the major manufacturers in Germany and America?

Basinet: As far as we know, there are at least a dozen glassworks sites spread out in the Thuringen region in Germany. That’s really where handmade glass marbles were born. We know the names of few of the manufacturers, but as of yet we have no way of differentiating which glassworks made which marble. We just know it came from one of them. So collectors don’t usually refer to the names of the glassworks. They just lump them all together and call them German swirls.

The first big name in America was M. F. Christensen. There was also Akro Agate, which for a long time was the leading American manufacturer of marbles. They were in business from the late 1910s up until about 1950. Other companies include Peltier Glass Company, Christensen Agate Company, Vitro Agate Company, and there are probably about a dozen more I could rattle off, mostly smaller companies that produced a specific type of marble. As far as any still in operation today, there’s Marble King, which has been in business since the mid-1950s, and Jabo Inc., which is a company that actually grew out of Vitro Agate.

Currently, they are the only two American manufacturers—just about everything else is coming out of Japan or Mexico. If you go to Wal-Mart or almost any store that sells toys, their marbles are going to be from Mexico. American companies make children’s marbles too, but they mostly make industrial marbles which are just plain and used in spray cans and things like that.

Collectors Weekly: What are the other differences between the vintage and contemporary marbles?

Basinet: Since World War II, glass has been made more cheaply. The colors are less vibrant and they’re usually applied to the surface of the marble over a clear base. There are different designs, different colors, different glass quality. A lot of the traits about them are different, but some are the same too. Marble machinery hasn’t changed that much since it was first invented. There were just a few tweaks here and there that made the marbles come out looking different.

Collectors Weekly: Are there different phases of marble design?

Basinet: Sure, but there’s a lot of overlap too. Some of the earliest marbles made in America are called slags. They have a clear or transparent-colored glass base with white swirled in. For the longest time, those were what the major American marble manufacturers were producing, with a few exceptions called onyxes that tried to replicate the appearance of stone, like carnelian, agate, and even gemstones. They were intended to look like stone marbles because in the late 1800s and early 1900s, stone marbles were among the most expensive marbles for children to buy. If you owned a stone marble, you were considered a rich kid. As new techniques were developed, new designs came out. You can come up with a taxonomic chart of all the different styles, but there’s no really smooth transition from one type to the other.

All the styles had different names. In some cases the companies gave them names, in other cases the children gave them names. Some of those names are still used by collectors, who come up with their own names to describe the old styles. Different collectors might call the same marbles different things. It gets complex, and everyone’s got a different opinion when it comes to naming a marble. If you go to a marble show, you’ll hear people talking about the marbles in what sounds like a foreign language.

Some of the later popular marbles were called corkscrews. They had two or more colors with one color spiraling on top of another. Those were produced by Akro Agate, and they were actually given different names by the company, depending on the style. They were mainly called specials, but we collectively put them all into one group called corkscrews and then there are different types within the corkscrews—onyxes, snakes, Popeyes. It gets very specific.

There are also marbles from other companies that are given colorful names. A lot were named after superheroes. All collectors recognize the Superman or the Spider-Man. The Superman is a particular marble from a company called Peltier, and it has a blue base with red and yellow stripes or ribbons on it, the colors of Superman’s suit. Spider-Man is the same—it’s a red and blue marble.

Some names have more meaning than others among collectors because some are just so difficult to find. There’s a marble from Christensen Agate called the guinea that was never very popular with children and was quickly discontinued. Today, some of those guineas can sell for upwards of $500 and more.

It’s not like collecting coins where you pretty much know everything that’s out there and how much was made. With a coin, you can also tell exactly the year it was made. I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years and collecting for an additional five, and I probably don’t have a week go by that I don’t see a marble that confounds me. I don’t think I will ever see every variation that’s out there. You can stick with this hobby your entire life and never get bored with it.

Collectors Weekly: Did manufacturers make the same marble over and over?

Basinet: Sort of. Every day they’d fill up their tanks with different colored glass and run hundreds of thousands of marbles of the same color combination. Everything looks the same, although there are going to be slight variations in the design, depending on the machinery. A lot of the machinery just pumps in random swirls. They might create nearly a million of those in a single day and fill up a box car with them. The next day they change the glass and run the same type of marble but in different colors.

We see a lot more of some types of marbles than others. Some were met with a lot of enthusiasm from children so they made more of those. Others weren’t as popular and they had to take into account the expense, because a lot of these really early marbles were made with high-quality glass. The man who came up with a lot of the colors for Christensen Agate and Akro Agate had also worked at Cambridge Glass. So you have marbles that really are made with some of the highest-quality glass from that era as opposed to today where marbles that you’d buy in the store are cheap glass that shatter easily and have less- intense colors.

Christensen Agate began in 1925 but was out of business by 1931. Their glass was such a high quality that the Great Depression hit them hard. But during those six years or so, they created some of the best machine-made marbles around and are among the top collectibles.

Collectors Weekly: You mentioned that cat’s eyes were popular among children. Are they also popular to collect?

Basinet: They aren’t especially popular, but collectors have given them a little more attentionin the past five years or so. We’ve identified some types that are actually quite rare. It’s challenging to find them because for every 10,000 cat’s eyes you look at, you might find one or two that are worth saving. Most cat’s eyes are just cheap, ugly-looking marbles, but there are people who collect nothing but cat’s eyes and love them very much.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most sought-after marbles?

Basinet: It would be difficult to answer that in terms of the design. There are Christensen Agate marbles out there that sell for thousands of dollars, but they don’t have a specific name, just a name that describes them all as a group, like striped opaques or guineas or swirls. These marbles had the best colors, so they tend to be the most popular among collectors.

Among handmade marbles, some styles are much rarer than others. For instance, the Joseph’s coat style is much rarer than the Laticinio, so they tend to be more collectible.

The term “lutz” refers to a substance called goldstone that was put in handmade marbles. Just about any handmade marble with goldstone, or lutz, is desirable. Onionskins are very popular among handmade marble collectors, too. If you could deconstruct an onionskin marble, you’d see multiple layers beneath that outer layer.

Figural marbles are some of the earliest of the handmade marbles. Those are known as sulfides. A small, usually unpainted white figurine is injected, if you will, into molten glass. Those weren’t made from canes like most handmade marbles from Germany; they were pretty much hand-gathered. You gather a glob of clear glass on the end of a rod and stick the figurine in it while it’s still molten. They were difficult to make because the figurine or the glass itself might shatter because of the differentials in the material temperatures and density. They’re the most attractive marbles and they tend to be highly collectible because they’re quite rare. To find any of those unplayed with in mint condition is quite extraordinary.

Collectors Weekly: Did marbles have any connection with paperweights or other glass objects?

Basinet: There are some similarities, but less than you’d imagine. It’s very unusual to see a millefiori handmade antique glass marble. There are a few, and they’re called paperweight marbles, which is sort of an oxymoron because they’re round marbles, not paperweights with flat ends. But they appear very similar and may have been made in the same country. Other than that, most paperweights are completely different from marbles.

Collectors Weekly: Did marble companies make other glass items?

Basinet: Akro Agate was the leading manufacturer of marbles in the U.S. for a long time, and they also made other items, such as a whole children’s line of toy dish sets. They also made ashtrays, urns, and planters. Those are very collectible on their own. Akro Agate is a term that you’ll hear not only among marble collectors but also glass collectors, especially Depression Glass collectors.

Collectors Weekly: Is the term “art glass” associated with marbles?

Basinet: We call any modern marble that’s made by hand "art glass.” There have been a few exceptions coming out of China and Mexico, but almost all modern marbles that are made by hand are created as art pieces and not for play. The artists that produce them are some of the top artists in the country. You have to add the modifier to make sure people realize that we’re not just talking about a children’s plaything—we’re talking about a piece of art that can fetch thousands of dollars, depending on the artist.

Collectors Weekly: What are the steps you take to identifying a marble?

Basinet: That’s the million-dollar question. If I had an easy way of answering that, I’d be rich. Learning to identify marbles on your own is difficult. If you’re a new collector, the way to do it would be to determine what they’re made of. It should be pretty easy to figure out if they’re glass or clay. If they’re glass, then you have to try to figure out if they’re machine-made or handmade.

I recommend people just take the marbles and try to group them together with others that are as similar as possible and begin looking for common traits. Once you’ve mastered being able to tell the difference between a machine-made marble and a handmade marble, then you can start worrying about the subcategories of what type it is and who made it. The learning curve is steep and requires lots of hands-on experience.

I don’t have any identification books on hand—I haven’t used them for a decade. I remember being completely confused by them when I began this hobby. They did me very little good, and it wasn’t until I started talking to other collectors who showed me the ropes that I began to pick things up. I would urge anyone interested in the hobby of marbles to begin by finding a show in their area because marble collectors are always happy to talk to newbies about some of the finer points of identifying and collecting.

Collectors Weekly: How do you determine if a marble is a fake?

Basinet: I’ve gotten really good at it because there are certain things that I’ve just learned to look for, but it’s hard to translate that into a couple of sentences. You really have to know your marbles. Obviously, with fakes and reproductions, there has to be a financial interest for the person producing it, so the more expensive marbles are the ones that people are going to try to replicate. I would just say if someone offers you a deal and it sounds too good to be true, like they’re offering you a type of marble that you know in the books goes for about $500 and now you can get it for $100, then beware.

Other than that, I would just say that you have to start off slow and work your way into the hobby before you start laying out money. Never lay out more money than you’re comfortable with and buy from someone who’s reputable. Find someone you trust. Other than that, it just takes a lot of education because trying to describe in words the difference between a fake and an authentic marble is impossible.

Even showing pictures would be difficult. I inspect the marble with a 30-power loop before I can start seeing that there are tiny nuances in it that let you know that it’s not what it’s purported to be. It’s not a huge problem with our hobby, not like it might be with some others.

Collectors Weekly: Are there shows and clubs?

Basinet: Yes. I used to try to get to shows quite a bit. I couldn’t tell you how many are held each year, but there are quite a few. Some are large, some are small, but all are fun. You can go to some marble-related websites and find the locations. Some of the oldest shows have been going on for 25 years.
There are also a lot of clubs, which sponsor many of the shows. You can join a lot of the clubs for small membership fees and get quarterly or monthly newsletters that’ll keep you updated on when shows are taking place. Some of the clubs are national or international, others are regional.

A good one is the Marble Collectors Society of America, or MCSA. It’s been around for probably 30 years. They don’t organize shows anymore, but they still put out a newsletter. Then there are clubs like the Buckeye Marble Club in Ohio. They host two shows every year which are among the most popular shows right now.

There are a lot of marble discussion forums online, too. That’s where newer collectors go. There’s a jerk in every crowd, of course, but for the most part, when new beginners go to these forums and ask questions, people are very eager to help. A lot of people might see something on eBay, for instance, but they’re not sure about it, so they post a link on one of the forums and then others can comment. It’s a good way to get additional information.

Collectors Weekly: What have you noticed about the age group of marble collectors?

Basinet: Some people start out very young, usually with the encouragement of their parents, but I know collectors who are well into their 80s. If there’s one demographic group that really sticks out as being more prominent than others, it would be middle-aged men. I think with men, nostalgia plays a more important role in collecting.

There are a lot of female collectors. For the most part, I think women are a little bit more likely to be collectors of contemporary art glass marbles because of their beauty. Most male collectors like handmade and machine-made marbles that remind them of their youth.

Male or female, a lot of collectors are clustered in the Midwest in little towns. Some of these towns may have populations under 10,000, but they’ll have five or six serious collectors. I’m assuming the reason is networking. Most American marbles were crafted in Ohio and West Virginia. Those are the states where there are also the largest numbers of collectors, which makes sense.

Collectors Weekly: Is there anything else that you want to add that we maybe missed or that you can think of about marbles or collecting?

Basinet: They still sell marbles in stores, so I’m thinking some kids still play with them even though video games seem to have overshadowed that. It’s a long tradition, a part of our American and European cultures, so I hope kids will continue playing for a long time.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you Alan for taking the time to talk with us about marbles!

The World's Priciest Marbles by Mike Smith (Yahoo.com games blog) October 13, 2011

Think marbles are just child's play?

Although the speedy little spheres have been popular toys for thousands of years, today's marble collectors are prepared to lay down some decidedly grown-up quantities of coin for these colorful trinkets.

But what differentiates an everyday glass bauble from a thousand-dollar one-off? Like many collectibles, it's a combination of condition, rarity, demand, and vintage -- but there are five standout classes that consistently draw the big bucks.

Sulphide marbles

Roosevelt marble

In fact, the biggest bucks drawn for a marble is one of this rare variety.

There's nothing better for collector value than ceasing production -- and nobody's been turning out these desirable clear baubles for nearly a century. Cunningly, they contain tiny porcelain figures -- usually white, although sometimes colored ones pop up -- depicting animals, mythological characters, famous buildings, and the like. Among the most collectible of marbles, good-condition examples with desirable, detailed figurines can easily fetch prices around $1,000.

At the top end? A 1900 marble containing a bust of Theodore Roosevelt, which recently sold at auction for $4,500.

German swirls

German Swirl marble

Though the name makes them sound like a punishment meted out in a high school bathroom, the truth is a little more matter-of-fact. German swirls are glass marbles with a swirled pattern suspended in the center, handmade in Germany from around 1850 to 1930 or so.

And the bigger the marble, the more it's worth. Figure on anything from $10-20 for a ⅝", everyday example to several thousand for a large, finely detailed German swirl in mint condition.

Agate marbles

Agate marble (Agate marble?)

While it's glass that tends to be the most sought after material for marble collectors, agate -- a variety of quartz -- has its fans, too.

They originally shot to popularity among serious marbles players thanks to their weight and hardness, the perfect combination for knocking lesser marbles out of play.

Chiefly made in Germany and the USA, their manufacturing process was labor-intensive and hazardous; the fine dust produced by the grinding machines made workers particularly susceptible to tuberculosis, and many died young as a result. This made them expensive to buy, and they remain valuable today, with good quality larger examples fetching as much as $200 a pop.

Lutz marbles

Lutz marble

Characterized by their lustrous swirls of golden metallic crystals, Lutz marbles take their name from French glassblower Nicholas Lutz, who worked out of a glass company in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and pioneered the use of "goldstone" (copper aventurine, a form of glass bearing tiny copper crystals) in many of his works.

Lutz probably never made marbles himself, but after he died in 1906 his ideas would be adopted by European factories, and for a brief period in the early 20th century, glitzy "Lutz marbles" were plentiful and cheap. Thanks to World War I, that didn't last, and today Lutz marbles are rare collector's items. Once again, the key to value is condition, size, and design: even a basic Lutz is worth around $100, while larger and more intricate examples can run well into four figures.

China marbles

China marbles

That's "china" the ceramic, not the country. European craftsmen began fashioning marbles from porcelain around the turn of the 19th century; handpainted and with a high-temperature glaze, they were both attractive and durable.

Designers came up with numerous patterns, including painted geometric shapes, flowers, and bullseyes, but particularly sought-after are the so-called "scenic" chinas, which depict pastoral scenes around the equator of the marble and have pinwheel patterns at either end. However, only a few pastorals survive, and consequently good examples can fetch as much as $10,000. If you can find them. Which you probably can't.