By Ben Marks

When “The Muppets” storms the world’s multiplexes this holiday season, there will no doubt be lots of little kids who, thanks to “Sesame Street,” will associate the wide-mouthed cloth puppets with learning to count to 10 and reciting their ABCs. But for many of their Gen-X parents and Baby Boomer grandparents, “The Muppets” will conjure school lunch boxes, flannel pajamas, and brightly colored board games, all inspired by “The Muppets Show,” a variety-style hour of family-friendly TV that aired between 1976 and 1981.

With …

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Two special guests visited our San Francisco headquarters today, Gary Goff (right) and John Infurna (center, seen with CollectorsWeekly.com publisher, Dave Margulius, at left). Gary is a renowned telephone collector, who runs a terrific website called TelephoneCollector.info. John also collects, but he may be better known for the painstakingly authentic replicas of everything from glass Red Cross mouthpieces (fabricated to his exacting specifications by Fenton) to potbelly candlestick telephones from the late 1890s. In fact, he says some sneaky eBay sellers try to …

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By Ben Marks

When the 2011 fall television season made its noisy debut in September, two shows stood out for their potential to generate the same level of retro-cool buzz as “Mad Men.” One was NBC’s “The Playboy Club,” which explored the lives of Playboy bunnies in 1960s Chicago—it was quickly cancelled. The other was ABC’s “Pan Am,” which followed four stewardesses based in New York City in 1963. After posting impressive numbers for its pilot episode and despite receiving generally good reviews, the show’s ratings …

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By Lisa Hix

Halloween is the time of year when people reveal their most ghoulish fears and fantasies, decorating their houses with fake mummies, plastic skulls and skeletons, and eerie contorted faces carved into apples and pumpkins. But for a certain breed of collector, like artist Ryan Matthew Cohn (pictured above, in a photo by Sergio Royzen), this sort of decor is just not creepy enough. Such collectors would rather deck their apartments with specimen jars, real mummified heads, musical instruments made out of human bones, …

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By Lisa Hix

There’s something to be said for being easily amused. In the 1940s, toy inventor Eddie Goldfarb saw an ad for a false-teeth holder called a “Tooth Garage” and he started cracking up. In his head, he saw a pair of dentures, chomping and sputtering down the road like a car, and parking on their own.

Thus, in 1949, Yakity-Yak Talking Teeth—the wildly popular wind-up gag commonly known as “chattering teeth”—were born.

Goldfarb took his invention to toy kingpin Marvin Glass, who showed it …

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Today Kevin Mackey, aka AR8Jason, topped 1,000 Show & Tells. Congratulations Kevin! When Mackey first started posting photos and descriptions of his militaria, watch fobs, pocket watches, wristwatches, pinbacks, art pottery, and countless other things back in February of 2011, we knew a thoughtful individual had just joined the community. His first Show & Tell was about a painting of Robert E. Lee. After explaining how he had bought the painting at an auction (he recalls the auctioneer describing it as …

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By Joanna Mangan and Lisa Hix

For antiques lovers, Judith Miller is practically a patron saint. Over 30-plus years, she has published 105 Miller’s Antiques Guides in the United States and the United Kingdom, covering every topic under the sun—from motorcycles and porcelain to costume jewelry and furniture—and including identification tips, prices, and all the other details collectors really want. Also an antiques columnist, lecturer, and appraiser for the British version of “Antiques Roadshow,” Miller often travels to the United …

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By Ben Marks

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I loved the music of the Grateful Dead. I grew up in Marin County where most of the band members lived, attended the high school where the phrase 420 was coined (or so I’m told…), and spent some of the best nights of my life in front of the early incarnations of the band’s legendary Wall of Sound at Winterland. I guess you could say I was a fan, and to this day I still give the …

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By Lisa Hix

In case you missed it, there’s a tremendous public debate roiling in the U.S. about whether bankers and Wall Street financiers profited from the current economic downturn after being bailed out by taxpayers. Certain politicians and talking heads have admonished the Occupy Wall Street protestors for engaging in “class warfare,” but populist rage against “fat cats” is not new.
“George S. Parker was bored by moralistic games.”
Cast-iron mechanical banks from the late 19th century depict fat bankers slipping coins into their own pockets, as seen …

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By Lisa Hix

Keys have always been endowed with a certain sort of magic. They have the power to reveal things that were unknown or obscured before. Even the word “key” means a tool that opens physical, intellectual, or spiritual barriers. A key can give access to riches and treasure, or it might keep safe closely guarded secrets, as in the legend of Pandora’s Box.

Locks and keys can also be used to protect one’s most valued belongings or to secure the gates …

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By Ben Marks

When we published our first interview with Rob Niederman back in 2008, he was focused, if you will, on historically significant and exceedingly rare pre-1900 wood cameras. Most camera collectors don’t usually start at such lofty heights. A more common obsession (for some it’s just a phase) is to collect Kodak cameras.

A problem for all camera collectors, 100 years downstream, has always been the lack of information about the things they’re trying …

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By Lisa Hix

“Taxidermy is never a mundane science,” Rachel Poliquin wrote in her 2009 essay, “Immortal Beauties,” on photographer Mary Frey‘s ongoing taxidermy ambrotype project “Imagining Fauna.” “It is the queasy art of seeing what would not, should not, be seen. It is the art of extending animal form beyond its natural lifespan.”

Poliquin, a life-long taxidermy connoisseur and scholar from Vancouver, taps into the peculiar yearning this art form evokes in her upcoming Penn State Press book, “The Breathless Zoo: …

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