Popular ’60s hobby a playground for collectors
When Mike Dibblee of Hilden, N.S. bought three bags of marbles at a yard sale in Stewiacke, N.S. four years ago, memories of his boyhood came rushing back.
“When I was a kid in the 1960s, we all played marbles, all the boys, anyway, at recess and lunchtime. We’d play endless games where the goal was to win marbles from the other guys,” he said.
With no single game called marbles, children were limited only by their creativity, with most of them “playing for keeps.”
The son of a Canadian serviceman, Dibblee quickly learned the language of marbles varied from posting to posting.
“The marbles we called crockies or shooters in Debert or Masstown were called boulders when we moved to Petawawa.”
Other names for lager marbles include smashers, giants, thumpers, bonkers, and toebreakers. In this slang language of alleys and aggies, marble fans are known as mibsters.
As a child, Dibblee, now 60, counted among his favourites the marbles commonly known as pretties or beauties.
“They are solid colours with other colours in them and you can’t see through them. They weren’t at all rare but certainly not as common as cat’s eyes, which are clear glass,” he explains.
Dibblee poured his three bags of marbles into an oldfashioned glass milk bottle and took them to his flea market table in New Glasgow, where he sold them the next day to a woman who loved how the light glinted off them. By that time, his interest was growing.
“I attend a lot of estate sales and auctions, so I just started looking and asking for marbles. If I could get a bag or a jar at a good price, I got them. I’ve been lucky to find a lot.”
He has even been in the odd bidding war over a bag of mixed marbles.
“I know what I’m prepared to pay and sometimes you don’t get what you want.”
He keeps an exact record of what he buys and sells, and at last count, he had 112,000 marbles, down slightly from a pre-christmas high of 114,000.
“I had a plan to get to 10,000 and quit, but that took less time than I expected, so I decided to go for 100,000. And now that I’ve passed that, might as well go for a quarter-million.”
LONG HISTORY
As Dibblee’s stock of marbles has grown, so has his knowledge.
“It just happened naturally. As I’d take notice of particular marbles, I’d want to see what I could learn about them. I did some research and joined a couple of online groups.”
The vast majority of Dibblee’s marbles are glass but he has some made of clay.
“I own some clay marbles that are ancient Chinese and others made in Germany. Most of the older German ones are shades of brown and were used as ballast on ships coming across the Atlantic. They were then shovelled overboard or onto the shore to make way for goods coming onboard.”
His clay marbles include blue and brown benningtons, which have a characteristic distinctive eye and a salt glaze finish.
The first marbles considered collectible were those made in Germany between 1860 and the First World War. They were made from long canes of molten glass, snipped into pieces with special scissors and shaped. All have one tiny rough spot, known as a pontil, from where they came off the cane.
“Those marbles are pretty hard to come by these days. They are in demand, so if you find one, you’ll have no trouble selling it right away,” said Dibblee.
SOURCE OF CONVERSATION
His own marbles from elementary school days are long gone, passed on to someone or left behind in one of his family’s moves. Most likely they were mass-produced, machine-made marbles that did not become collectible until the past few decades.
“Marbles are a great source of conversation. They make people smile and they’ll tell you about the games they played as they wonder what became of their old marbles.”
He cringes a little when people tell him about the hundreds they fired off in slingshots.
“The woods must be full of them if you could ever find them.”
Dibblee has had to come up with a wide assortment of containers for his collection.
“I try to put most of them in clear glass, so they are visible, and in some cases, they show really well. You put an old glass milk bottle full of blue and green marbles in a sunny window and you have a thing of beauty.”
He also uses jars, vases, and bowls, including a massive punch bowl which, when filled with marbles, weighs more than 50 pounds.
Among his more distinctive marbles are some in solid white colours bearing iconic images.
“They are called peltier marbles, and somebody brought a bag of about 60 to me at the flea market about a year ago.”
He has some marbles still in their original packaging, making them easier to date.
“I have quite a few from Taiwan, which is interesting because as best I can tell, they stopped producing marbles about 50 years ago.”
AN INVESTMENT
Dibblee values his current collection at approximately $30,000.
“I started collecting for the fun of it, but they have become a bit of an investment. With what I have been able to sell, they haven’t actually cost me anything.”
In the past few weeks, though, marbles have been hard to come by.
“I’ve only bought 150 recently so we could say there is a bit of a slump in the market. I expect it will pick up, at least by summer.”
He already has a couple of dozen young customers who regularly choose their favourites from his collection, but he is not expecting an onslaught.
“For marbles to get back to where they were in my childhood, we’d have to develop a remote-controlled one.”
Sadly, Dibblee’s enthusiasm for marbles is not shared by his son.
“I keep telling him it will all be his someday but he’s not very excited,” he laughed.
HISTORY OF MARBLES
Marbles of some sort have likely been around almost as long as there have been children to play with them.
The earliest were made of clay, stone or polished nuts, but commercial production of glass marbles began in Germany just before 1860. First used by toymakers as glass spheres for dolls’ eyes, they quickly became game pieces and children almost instantly developed imaginative games around them.
For many years, collectors sought these German glass marbles, but later, massproduced marbles have become increasingly in demand. Perhaps because they lacked visual appeal, clay marbles have never been as popular as glass.
Mike Dibblee is characteristic of the more recent wave of nostalgic marble collectors: those who delighted in playing with mass-produced, machine-made marbles in their youth, whether they were manufactured in the United States, Mexico or Taiwan.
“As a boy, I was attracted by the variety of colours and shapes within the marbles. That visual appeal is still really strong,” said Dibblee.
Since becoming a collector, he has learned about sizing, grading and dating marbles, sometimes even tracing them to a particular producer. Though he sells common marbles for as little as 10 cents, some go for far higher prices at auction. Not surprisingly, every collector lives in hope of stumbling upon one.
“I suppose my dream marble would be an onionskin swirl. It would be absolutely amazing to have one of those in my hands,” said Dibblee.
Just such a marble sold for US$10,350 at Morphy Auctions, a selling house for antiques and fine art in Denver, PA, and Las Vegas, NV, in 2018. It did not even set a record for onionskins, as an end of days onionskin sold for almost US$15,000 in 2004.
The most valued marble in the world may be an opaque lutz, which sold for US$25,000. With its rare pink background colour and distinctive striping, it was produced by the Christensen agate company in Ohio after the collapse of the German marble industry. It was expected to net approximately US$6,000 when it went to auction but frenzied collectors pushed the price up dramatically.
Go online: For more information, visit marblecollecting.com.