Recently, I purchased this garage sale copy stand to further my Make Magazine activities. In the pre-copy stand days, I was endlessly stumbling over my tripod, never able to extend deep enough over the table, fighting with uneven lighting, never getting a square overhead shot and always on the damn pins and the damn needles about knocking over the whole shooting match. A week prior to purchasing this copy stand, I passed on a different model for which the owners were asking the princely sum of $50. Apparently they had never heard about the flatbed scanner revolution. Luckily, the very next weekend, this example was purchased from sober and technologically aware sellers for a much more reasonable $10. They knew they had a turd and more importantly, they knew they had a sucker.So, I completed all Make column reference photos with the aid of my copy stand and it was a smashing home run. Then it dawned on me that I should use it to catalog the world's most important museum to be contained in a Skippy peanut butter jar. My Cabinet of Curiousites is split into broad catagories like Natural Splendor, Math and Science and Youth and Folly. My most compact museum of one child's great treasures fits in a single peanut butter jar and resides in the Youth and Folly wing.
Looks like it is floating in space, doesn't it? When was the last time you bought something that was guaranteed to be perfect? Nevermind the peanut butter, this jar is perfect.
Don't worry about that cut on my finger - it is healing just fine.This exquisite jar is the Navarro toolbox of blue sky dreaming. It is skinned knees and tiddlywinks from the post-war era of unlimited potential and knowing superiority. This jar houses the collected treasures of Mr. Frankie Bartoli of Chicago, Illinois and was sold to me by his family for $1. I bought it because the Smithsonian had not stopped at the garage sale prior to my arrival. But, like the Smithsonian would have, I took a photo of every single item inside.
No individual item is handmade or fine. The jar is filled with a bunch of dimestore crap but, as any curator will tell you, the sum of the parts is more important than the individual you-know-what. Commonplace five-n-dime, but every so often I needed to take the camera from the copy stand and get some perspective. The shoe is familiar to anybody who has ever played a board game in their entire life, but look at that elegant coupe in the background. Some of us spend lots of time thinking about the reference that went into little toys like this. French Deco. Definitely French.
The copy stand is really great. Perhaps I should do a Make article on building one, because the results are pretty stunning. Of course, building one would be twice the cost of finding one at a garage sale. With the matched lights on each side, the light is really flat on the high surfaces and I am crazy about the shadows going in both directions. As far as the object itself, what can I say? You see it.
Garage sales deliver in more ways than can be enumerated. Perhaps one day I will pen a little book of sonnets on what garage sales can mean. Worse sonnets have probably been written. When you garage sale, you see things that you forgot. Mundane objects that you had forgotten about transport you back to experiences that you had forgotten. Corning Ware coffee pots and brass fireplace andirons all remind you.
Everyday the Wall Street Journal arrives in a rubber band and during weeks when I get few issues read, I joke that my WSJ subscription is nothing but an extremely expensive daily rubber band delivery service. But when you find a rubber band in your jar of treasures, you realize that you had forgotten how satisfying a big meaty rubber band can be.
When you are a kid, currency is very elastic. Money is certainly understood, coveted, and quickly spent, but the more immediate kid currency is anything that can be used and enjoyed at once, like caps, bubble gum, water balloons, BBs and bicycle inner tubes.
Of all the deluxe items found inside the most wonderful jar, my very favorite is this well used eraser. I use pencils daily and make do with the eraser that is on the pencil end. When I saw this eraser, I realized how little I really use pencils in comparison to when I was 10. That was a pencil and eraser intensive period.
Every object photographed at my Flickr set Compact Childhood Museum. None of the objects from the museum are for sale, though I would donate the entire collection to the Smithsonian or trade for a Hispano-Suiza.
No individual item is handmade or fine. The jar is filled with a bunch of dimestore crap but, as any curator will tell you, the sum of the parts is more important than the individual you-know-what. Commonplace five-n-dime, but every so often I needed to take the camera from the copy stand and get some perspective. The shoe is familiar to anybody who has ever played a board game in their entire life, but look at that elegant coupe in the background. Some of us spend lots of time thinking about the reference that went into little toys like this. French Deco. Definitely French.
The copy stand is really great. Perhaps I should do a Make article on building one, because the results are pretty stunning. Of course, building one would be twice the cost of finding one at a garage sale. With the matched lights on each side, the light is really flat on the high surfaces and I am crazy about the shadows going in both directions. As far as the object itself, what can I say? You see it.
Garage sales deliver in more ways than can be enumerated. Perhaps one day I will pen a little book of sonnets on what garage sales can mean. Worse sonnets have probably been written. When you garage sale, you see things that you forgot. Mundane objects that you had forgotten about transport you back to experiences that you had forgotten. Corning Ware coffee pots and brass fireplace andirons all remind you.Everyday the Wall Street Journal arrives in a rubber band and during weeks when I get few issues read, I joke that my WSJ subscription is nothing but an extremely expensive daily rubber band delivery service. But when you find a rubber band in your jar of treasures, you realize that you had forgotten how satisfying a big meaty rubber band can be.
When you are a kid, currency is very elastic. Money is certainly understood, coveted, and quickly spent, but the more immediate kid currency is anything that can be used and enjoyed at once, like caps, bubble gum, water balloons, BBs and bicycle inner tubes.
Of all the deluxe items found inside the most wonderful jar, my very favorite is this well used eraser. I use pencils daily and make do with the eraser that is on the pencil end. When I saw this eraser, I realized how little I really use pencils in comparison to when I was 10. That was a pencil and eraser intensive period.Every object photographed at my Flickr set Compact Childhood Museum. None of the objects from the museum are for sale, though I would donate the entire collection to the Smithsonian or trade for a Hispano-Suiza.
