In a Cats Eye

 

QUESTION: As a kid, I played marbles with my buddies. I started playing with marbles when I was in third grade and by the fifth grade, I was our school’s marble champion. At the time, I liked the way the marbles looked but knew nothing about how they were made. I’ve seen some old marbles online and would like to start a collection. What advice can you give me?

ANSWER: Marbles are a good item to collect because of their size. But don’t let their small size fool you. Some of the older handmade marbles can go as high as $700 for a 2½-inch end-of-day one. 

For those who have never played marbles, the goal of each shot is to hit one of the marbles in the center and knock it out of the circle. If the player knocks a marble out, then they get to keep the marble for the rest of the game, they also get to take another turn. If the first player doesn’t knock a marble out of the circle, the next player then gets a turn.

Aggies, cats eyes, popeyes, red devils, pearls, turtles, bumblebees—these were all nicknames for marbles. A cat's eye marble, for instance, had central eye-shaped colored inserts or cores injected inside the marble. A devil's eye was red with yellow eye.

Many marble players grew up to be marble collectors. Many treasure the handmade glass marbles produced in Germany between 1865 and 1910. These represented a golden age of marbles---a time when artisans made them one at a time.

Although glass marbles date from Roman times, the invention of the marble scissors in 1846 advanced the technique considerably. An unknown glass-worker in Lausche, a town in the porcelain-making province of Thruingen, Germany, forged a pair of tongs with a cup on one end and a knife blade on the other. He attached the cup with a screw which could be made larger or smaller depending an the size of the marble needed. This invention made it possible to produce round glass marbles in quantity.

For years, collectors have referred to the scar or break mark left by the marble scissors as a "pontil mark.”' However, this isn’t correct. Glassmakers used a pontil rod for making blown glass, not marbles. Depending on the production technique, all antique handmade glass marbles have either one or two pontil marks.

German glass marbles came in a dazzling array of colors, types, and sizes in two large and distinguishable categories—antique cane-cut and individually made. Despite their differences, glassmakers cut marbles in each category with marble scissors.

Antique Cane-Cut Marbles
“Glass cane” has at least two meanings. It refers both to thin, individual threads of transparent opaque or colored glass and to the glass rod produced when combining threads. The Germans performed a similar creative transformation when they produced marbles from glass cane. The result was the "German Swirl."

When the core or cooler portion of a marble was an open network of opaque or colored glass threads, collectors refer to it as a glass latticinio core The number of threads in the delicate interior lattice varied vary from 8 to 40. Cores in red, blue or green are rare today. Close to the surface of the marble and distinct from the core were additional ribbons and swirls of complementary or contrasting colored glass. More than half the German Swirls had latticinio cores.

Solid cores looked like a column of tightly packed and consecutive colored glass threads. There was no clear glass at the core. The core, itself, was a solid color or colors. Divided and ribbon core marbles were subtly different. Most antique divided core swirls resembled a DNA molecule, but with three strands instead of two. Clear glass separated or divided the strands of color. In contrast, ribbon cores had only one or two somewhat wider divisions. Ribbon cores took considerable skill to produce and were rare compared to divided cores. 

Artisans created some German Swirls around a ball of colored glass. The swirl markings had to be bright and near or on the surface in order to be seen. A variation on this theme was the use of opaque glass as the core. Confusion results when the same style name is applied to marbles in both of these categories.  For example, clambroths, gooseberries, and Indians were names given to certain types of colored and opaque glass marbles. Glassmakers usually made the clambroth and gooseberry marbles with two subdued, delicate colors—one color forming the background and the other gently curving around the surface of the marble. Indians were typically black with bright contrasting rainbow colors close to the surface.

Individually Made Marbles 
Although artisans handmade cane-cut marbles, they didn’t make them individually. The marbles cut from the same, elongated, glass cane would certainly share some of the same color, style and core features. But each was not completely one of a kind. Individually made marbles were all unique creations.

Before they left work for the day, glassmakers often fashioned marbles from scraps and chips of canes left behind at the end of production. These marbles were usually large—at least one inch in diameter—then gave them to children in the neighborhood on their way home. "End-of-day" marbles belong to one of the rarest and most sentimental marble categories with prices ranging from $125 for a 1-inch to between $500 and $700 for a 2½  inch. These marbles have a single pontil mark, rather large spots and what looks like a balloon floating just below the marble's surface.

The golden age of German handmade glass marbles began to close as Germany entered World War I. Men and machinery used to produce toys were pressed into service for the war effort. Following the war and up until 1926, American toy catalogs continued to carry "imported glass" German marbles-Production most likely didn’t continue after 1910 primarily because of the perfect symmetry, availability, brilliance and competition of machine made marbles.

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