We have a set of 20 volumes of the World’s Greatest Literature in excellent condition. This beautiful set by Spencer Press is from the 1930s. Someone on your Christmas list will cherish this gift.
In doing a little research, we learned a bit about Spencer Press and the marketing of the World’s Greatest Literature series.
The World’s Greatest Literature series seems to have been sold in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as shown in the newspaper advertisement near the beginning of this entry.
As said before, these seem to be the same books. (as the Spencer Library of Immortal Masterpieces … or Literature) from SeriesOfSeries website
The history of marketing affordable books of World Literature in the early 1900s has a colorful history. We’re probably much more familiar with these tactics today. Here’s a quote from this colorful history from the SeriesOfSeries website.
Finally, the series is affiliated with the “American Home Library Foundation” which is portrayed as a charitable literary foundation, subsidizing the series to promote the reading of the classics. Together, the binding, the series name, and charitable literary foundation worked to convince potential book buyers that the Spencer Library was an opportunity they could not miss. That’s the spin: to sell copyright-free literary classics with dubious and fraudulent methods to gullible working and middle-class consumers who wanted to be at least perceived as a bit literary and intellectual.
No matter the tactics, we have this beautiful 20 volume set that is perfect for the right person! Do you know someone who would love this gift? If so, drop by Bahoukas Antique Mall today and grab it before the set gets broken up! And yes, we will be watchin’ for ya!
At Bahoukas, we have some wonderful decorating collectibles!
This beautiful set of Poinsettia decorated table pieces will make your holiday table festive and bright. Stop by to see just how beautiful these pieces really are.
Maybe you need a tabletop Christmas Tree. We have several beautiful trees with electric lights and a manger at the base. It’s perfect for a senior in a small apartment, for someone who prefers a minimalist approach to the holidays, or an added piece for a shelf or table top.
We also have a beautiful variety of tree ornaments. In fact, 3 boxes of wonderful, vintage Christmas balls were sold just this week. Don’t hesitate. Stop by and see the choice ornaments we have waiting to add a bit of sparkle to your decorating.
If you have a love and appreciation of an old-fashioned Christmas, stop in and see what we can add to your holiday decor.
Consider these delightful and colorful candles and small buildings to use under the tree, on a shelf, or to add to your train layout. Seriously, we have some really fun and beautiful Christmas Decorations. Including a variety of SANTAs for every purpose in your decorating. And you know it … we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
Are you in need of a particular kitchen utensil and need it NOW! Pop into Bahoukas Antique Mall and see if we have it for you. You’ll truly be surprised at our Surprise Boxes full of very practical and useable items!
Maybe you just need a small ladle for gravy or a handy serving spoon. Yep, we have a Surprise Box of those items, too.
Seriously, if you’ve not checked out the hidden boxes of ‘surprises’ that can be found throughout our shop, you really need to stop in and check us out. Of course, we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
PLEASE NOTE: We will be closed on Thanksgiving! But we’ll be ready for you today and throughout the Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Sunday and Cyber Monday… and we’re right here in your neighborhood!
Wishing everyone a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving Holiday!
This beautiful holiday celebration of Thanksgiving, we show our gratitude for all that we have. Most importantly, we are nudged to actually ‘notice’ what we have.
At the same time, we know that Thanksgiving hustles us into Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday for shopping.
If you’ve not started yet, it also leads us into Holiday Decorating. We thought we’d start our holiday ideas with some very special and collectible Santas that are waiting for you to add delight to your holiday decor.
Look at this assortment of 1970s AFX Aurora Slot Cars
The Aurora Plastics Corporation introduced the A/FX (Aurora Factory Experimentals, later simply “AFX”) line of slot cars, slot car track sets, and related accessories in 1971. The AFX brand continued production until the company was forced into receivership in 1983.[1]Aurora designed the AFX cars with interchangeable car body shells usually compatible with each chassis they released during these years. The original 1971 A/FX chassis utilized an updated version of the existing pancake motor design of Aurora’s “Thunderjet 500” line, popular in the 1960s.[2] Aurora then released a longer version of the A/FX chassis in 1973, known as the “Specialty” chassis, which incorporated a longer wheelbase and gearplate (and often a more powerful armature) with bodies unique to that chassis. The car bodies designed to fit the shorter original chassis featured a clever snap-on design while the bodies for the Specialty chassis were affixed with a small screw. In late 1974, Aurora redesigned both the original and Specialty chassis and exposed the bottom of the motor magnets. The exposed magnets were attracted to the metal rails in the track during racing, creating downforce to help hold the car on the track while cornering. AFX “Magna-Traction” cars remained popular from their release in 1974 throughout 1983, even after faster chassis designs were introduced in house and by Tyco. from Wikipedia
Then in 1960, the British company Playcraft Model Motoring had a slot car display at a London toy show. Representatives from Aurora, an American company that specialized in scale model kits, snatched up the American marketing rights for Playcraft’s slots. Within five years, Aurora had sold 25 million slot cars to eager kids, becoming the most successful line of slot cars in history.
Stop by the store and take a peek at these very collectible slot cars. Yep, we’re here (decorating for the holidays) and we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
Besides having the perfect numbers for your house, these metal numbers might be a perfect addition to a craft. Have you considered that? No? Well, at Bahoukas Antique Mall and Beer MuZeum, we have ‘Surprise Boxes’ scattered throughout the store.
CLICK HEREfor some ideas that will get your creative juices flowing. Our numbers are a few inches tall. But if you’re ‘crafty,’ these examples just may be the spark you need! One idea, paint them with different colors and use them for the kids’ bedroom or playroom!!! FUN!
Put your creativity hat on and consider how you might upcycle these treasures. Yep, We’ll be watchin’ for ya.
This beautiful set comes in a very nice wood box. It would make your home bartender very happy during the coming holiday parties. Tongs, strainer, double jigger, and more complete this beautiful and very collectible set. We’ve got you covered for unique ideas for the coming holiday season from entertaining to decorating, gifts to games. Yep, We’ll be watching for ya!
This unique drum was brought to our shop recently.
It’s a marching snare drum from the 1940s that was used by Maurice Pippin in the Drum & Bugle Corp of Bristol, VA before WWII! It’s in good condition with 2 sets of sticks and a cloth cover. Stop in and have a look. It’s quite beautiful. Imagine the history this drum could share if it could talk. Maybe a drummer can bring out its story. Oh, and by the way, we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
Pachinko (パチンコ) is a type of mechanical game originating in Japan and is used as both a form of recreational arcade game and much more frequently as a gambling device, filling a Japanese gambling niche comparable to that of the slot machine in Western gaming. from Wikipedia
Pachinko machines were first built during the 1920s as a children’s toy called the “Corinth game” (コリントゲーム korinto gēmu), based on and named after the American “Corinthian bagatelle”.[4] Another likely inspiration was the Billard japonais, ‘Japanese billiards’, invented in Western Europe during the 18th century. It emerged as an adult pastime in Nagoya around 1930 and spread from there. All of Japan’s pachinko parlors were closed down during World War II but re-emerged in the late 1940s. Pachinko has remained popular since; the first commercial parlor was opened in Nagoya in 1948. from Wikipedia
Here’s a video explaining how Pachinko is played.
Believe it or not, we have a Pachinko machine at Bahoukas. Of course, you believe it. After all, we have the “Collection of Collections!” Stop by and see it for yourself. Be sure to leave plenty of time to browse our 9,000+ sq ft of “Collections.” Yes, we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
While sorting some items in the shop, we realized that our reproduction canning labels are truly beautiful. Most are $5 each and we can order more and get them back in a day. (We also have some ‘original, collectible, canning labels if you desire those. Priced a bit higher.)
Anyway, check out the artwork. WOW! The photos don’t do justice to how great these actually look. (We took photos through a vinyl covering.)
Could you imagine decoupaging some of these beautiful canning labels for unique kitchen decor!
Beautiful. Oh, not sure what decoupage is:
Decoupage or Découpage is the art of decorating an object by gluing colored paper cutouts onto it in combination with special paint effects, gold leaf and other decorative elements. Commonly, an object like a small box or an item of furniture is covered by cutouts from magazines or from purpose-manufactured papers. from Wikipedia
Look around. You can create beautiful coasters, cover a cutting board or that wood knife holder on your counter, a tray (metal or wood), cupboard doors, jars, and more. Beautiful, unique, and truly your own! Stop by Bahoukas Antique Mall today and plan your holiday gift or creative decor items. We’ll be watchin’ for ya!
You just never know what might be discovered when you’re searching our shelves. High up on one of those shelves, we discovered a Home Pasteurizer by The Schlueter Co. of Wisconsin. Used for pasteurizing raw milk, we’ve discovered that they still make these.
… If you traveled through even fairly large cities around the year 1900, you would often come across something now illegal in most urban areas: milk cows. Dairy animals were not uncommon in cities, and it was often the task of young children to lead the animals to whatever grassy areas were available on the edge of town so they could graze.
In the last hundred years of urban migration, the number of home or small farm dairies has been greatly reduced. Who needed to keep a cow when it was so much simpler just to buy milk from the grocery store? As the population of rural areas emptied into urban centers, Americans became more and more disconnected from the source of all their dairy products… as well as more concerned about the quality of those products as dairies became enormous commercialized enterprises.
The above quote is from an article that gives the many sides of the raw vs pasteurized vs homogenized milk. If you’re one of those folks who take self-reliance and personal responsibility very seriously, we have a tool you might need.
…It’s actually very easy to pasteurize your own milk on the stovetop. An added bonus is that your milk won’t need to stand up to long distance shipping and prolonged storage, so you can pasteurize it safely using lower heat and less time than many industrial milk producers use. All you need is a stainless steel pot and a simple kitchen thermometer.
So there you have it: the tool or the recipe!
Of course, we keep telling you about all the surprises waiting for you to discover at Bahoukas Antique Mall and Beer MuZeum. You can be sure, we’ll be watchin’ for ya. Stop in soon!
Brides, wedding planners, and wedding shower hosts are always looking for unique decorations. At Bahoukas Antique Mall we have some beautiful, and a few humorous, collectible wedding toppers. They make great toppers for wedding cakes, of course. But they can also be used in wedding shower decor!
Wondering what other ways you might use collectible wedding toppers. VISIT THIS PAGE on HGTV.com for some really fun ideas. ENJOY … then stop by and see if we have something that might work for your creative project. Yes, we WILL be watchin’ for ya!
Developed in the early 1790s, the semaphore consisted of a series of hilltop stations that each had large movable arms to signal letters and numbers and two telescopes with which to see the other stations. Like ancient smoke signals, the semaphore was susceptible to weather and other factors that hindered visibility. A different method of transmitting information was needed to make regular and reliable long-distance communication workable. from History.com
Here is a U.S. Navy training video for using flags to signal:
Can you imagine communicating hilltop to hilltop?
It’s hard for us to picture such a life today, especially when having our phones unavailable for 15 minutes has us acting like we’re lost! Enter the telegraph machine – the beginning of the more reliable and more easily accessible communications.
In 1843, Morse and Vail received funding from the U.S. Congress to set up and test their telegraph system between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent Vail the historic first message: “What hath God wrought!” The telegraph system subsequently spread across America and the world, aided by further innovations.
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The electric telegraph transformed how wars were fought and won and how journalists and newspapers conducted business. Rather than taking weeks to be delivered by horse-and-carriage mail carts, pieces of news could be exchanged between telegraph stations almost instantly. The telegraph also had a profound economic effect, allowing money to be “wired” across great distances.
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Did you know? SOS, the internationally recognized distress signal, does not stand for any particular words. Instead, the letters were chosen because they are easy to transmit in Morse code: “S” is three dots, and “O” is three dashes.
A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force. In general, they are the simplest mechanisms that use mechanical advantage (also called leverage) to multiply force. The six classical simple machines which were defined by Renaissance scientists are:
Lever
Wheel and axle
Pulley
Inclined plane
Wedge
Screw
The simple machine was the beginning. We could take a simple machine and multiply our efforts. Then …
Substitution as makeshift is when human ingenuity comes into play and a tool is used for its unintended purpose such as a mechanic using a long screw driver to separate a cars control arm from a ball joint instead of using a tuning fork. In many cases, the designed secondary functions of tools are not widely known. As an example of the former, many wood-cutting hand saws integrate a carpenter’s square by incorporating a specially shaped handle that allows 90° and 45° angles to be marked by aligning the appropriate part of the handle with an edge and scribing along the back edge of the saw. The latter is illustrated by the saying “All tools can be used as hammers.” Nearly all tools can be used to function as a hammer, even though very few tools are intentionally designed for it and even fewer work as well as the original.
Here, at Bahoukas Antique Mall, we have a variety of tools for nearly every need. We have a wonderful assortment of vintage tools used for woodworking. But check these out for a different peek at what you might find on a shelf :
On the left is a beautiful microscope that just might delight a young person learning a bit of science! In the center, well, this is quite the calculator. What we can do on our smartphones is so much more than the efforts made with the Comptometer! Here’s a great video explain the mechanics behind the Comptometer. You can see how the ‘simple machines’ noted above make up the way these machines worked.
Do you wonder how you use them? Here’s another video. You can advance to around 3 minutes to see how to use it.
And finally, we have an old version of a tool/instrument to read your blood pressure. It’s intriguing to see wrist cuffs now that do the same.
Keep in mind, that tools started with the simplest machines noted above. Later, when you added steam, electricity, transistors, all leading to the computer age and the use of chips. Tools and instruments are fascinating. If you’re an older person, you’ll remember many of these transitions. If you’re a younger person, it might be fun to understand the development required to have the amazing tools you use today!
Hey, stop in and visit us at Bahoukas Antique Mall and Beer MuZeum. We love chatting. And yes, we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
Howdy Doody was an American children’s television program (with circus and Western frontier themes) that was created and produced by E. Roger Muir and telecast on the NBC network in the United States from December 27, 1947, until September 24, 1960. It was a pioneer in children’s television programming and set the pattern for many similar shows. One of the first television series produced at NBC in Rockefeller Center, in Studio 3A, it was also a pioneer in early color production as NBC (at the time owned by TV maker RCA) used the show in part to sell color television sets in the 1950s.
Remember this – here’s a show from 1947 from YouTube!
Click on the Wikipedia link for the history of the Howdy Doody Show. It’s most interesting. Also, we share a few photos from the show (also from Wikipedia ). Do you remember these characters? Did you have a favorite?
The other items in the top photo, available at Bahoukas Antique Mall in Havre de Grace include, a 1950s Howdy Doody puppet, on the left is a 1960s cloth hand puppet with a plastic clown face, goat and fox “push puppets”, a 1970s lady hand puppet and int the front right is a plastic frog hand puppet from the 1970s.
BRIEF HISTORY OF PUSH PUPPETS…
….where did they come from ? When were they first made? All Puppets in photos are from my own collection. Push puppets were first made in Switzerland by a wooden toy maker, Walter Kourt Walss in 1932. These articulated,wobbling toys were known as WAKOUWAS; taken from the first few letters of each of Walter’s names! The dancing, wiggling toys are now known by many different names around the world from Pomsie’s Push Puppets
Take a peek at the Pomsie site … you’ll even see a Howdy Doody push puppet!
In our last post, we shared a1994 car phone. Today we wanted to show you a 1950s-1060s magnetic dashboard clock. WOW … and now we’re all digital! Did you have a dashboard clock?
We also wanted to share an older pay phone. Golly, I remember that if you passed a pay phone, you immediately walked up and hoped someone had left their change. Now many youngsters wouldn’t even know how to use them.
Stop in and pay us a visit. We welcome you to stroll our very own “Nostalgia Lane.” You might just find the perfect collectible for your home decor or collection. And yes, of course, we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
We have one of these ‘amazing’ early cell phones in our shop. The instructions are very long AND the battery charging… well, let’s just say that complaints today have nothing over these 1990s phones. We’ve included an instructional video just so you can appreciate what you have today!
While checking this out, for some strange reason the show “Get Smart” came to mind and his ‘shoe phone.’ Do you remember that? No, we don’t have one of those. The photo is from Wikipedia. Don’t you just love what the internet can remember!
Stop in today and see what other crazy, intriguing, interesting, collectibles we have. Remember, we have the ‘Collection of Collections.” And yes, we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
When you collect miniatures, they’ll take less space. For the minimalist, it might be the perfect way to enjoy vintage and antique collectibles in a smaller or simpler space.
How long have we been collecting miniatures? Consider this quote:
Archeologists have discovered wooden miniatures of farm animals, carts and other everyday objects that date back to at least 5,000 BC in Egypt. It’s difficult to catalog the exact history of miniature collecting since there are so many different types of miniatures and ways the miniatures were used.
While people have collected miniatures for thousands of years, most early miniatures served a utilitarian purpose. Armies used miniature models for battlefield and wartime strategies. Architects and designers used miniature models to help visualize and refine designs for structures and furniture. Regardless of the purpose or type, it’s safe to say that people have been interested in miniature collecting for as long as miniatures have been around.
Above is a beautiful collection of miniatures including Czech glass – tiny, exquisite, and beautiful.
The above collection are lead crystal sets by Princess House. They include fish, horse, cow, rabbit and rat plus four circus figurines: clown, lion, elephant and seal.
So if you would like to start collecting, but also want to keep it manageable, start with ‘miniatures.’ Of course, we’re not saying that miniature collections can’t take over your space. But, that’s for another post!
Stop in and see the miniatures we have throughout the shop. We have also have a number of printers trays that are great for small collections. Of course, we’ll be watchin’ for ya!
