Premium Glass Marbles for Kids & Collectors - Classic Game Pieces, DIY Crafts & Home Decor - Perfect for Marble Runs, Board Games & Decorative Displays

This book is mostly a collection of pictures of individual marbles, seven to a page, supposedly marketed as an identification and price guide. It turns out to be a terrible waste of time and money for everyone.Promulgation of confusing and inaccurate terminology should have ceased long ago, with the publication of more factual marble books such as Gartley and Carskadden's "Colonial Period and Early 18th Century Children's Toy Marbles" and Paul Baumann's "Collecting Antique Marbles".There is a minimum of text, probably because of a scarcity of knowledge on the author's part. An obvious lack of appreciation of the origins and manufacturing techniques of these marbles creates some major errors and omissions. For example, a variety of distinctly different marbles are lumped together as either "lined pottery" or "lined crockery" or both. Painted clay marbles, variegated porcelain marbles as well as decorated American stoneware marbles are all called "lined pottery". The same photograph is sometimes repeatedly used with a different caption. The term "sponge ware" is used so frequently and inaccurately as to be meaningless. No mention is made of the ubiquitous limestone marble, nor the uncommon marble cut and ground from red veined marble, which probably gave toy marbles their name. No distinction is made between modern machine ground, semi-precious stone marbles, (cheaper by the pound at rock shops) and expensive hand cut German agates from the 19th century. We don't need seven individual pictures of blue "Bennington" marbles (a misnomer by the way) on a single page! Cane handles are lumped together with distinctly different painted china marbles, and the artists responsible for modern painted china marbles are not acknowledged. There is not a single reference to any of the numerous and often inaccurate statements, and the short bibliography is useless. A lack of an index is not surprising, as I doubt the author could ever come up with one, given the disorganization of the book. This is a book any experienced collector would find useless and to which no new collector should ever be exposed.