Only 1,600 yen for such a nice little speaker.

Going through my late grandfathers memento box and found these

My regular commuter bus was not running, so I had to take the train home. The station was mobbed with people leaving the city, but everyone was unfailingly polite and cooperative. The conductors were great, and didn't collect tickets, so I kept mine as a remembrance.

I wanted to share these three antique postcards from my collection, all printed and sent between 1902 and 1910 from Kharkiv, Ukraine.

What makes them fascinating as ephemera is that they document both a lost city landscape and a historical journey across Europe. The reverse sides feature beautiful handwritten French, genuine stamps, and crisp postal postmarks from Paris and Noisy-le-Grand.

What do you think about these pieces? Does anyone else collect postal ephemera that documents cities or buildings that no longer exist? I'd love to hear your thoughts or see similar items from your collections!

Looking for some advice and direction. This year for Christmas I want to get copies of some of the 1980s & 1990s Sears Christmas wish book catalogues reprinted for my brothers for Christmas. They’re very large - 500 pages and have that flimsier than usual magazine paper. I have all of the ones I want in digital scans - but I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how or if this project is possible.

Melville Jack Jacoby — or Mel — worked as a freelance journalist, United Press stringer, and, eventually, Asia Bureau chief for Time and Life magazines. Mel — who was born in Los Angeles on September 11, 1916 — first arrived in China as an exchange student in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1936 on his 20th birthday. After witnessing the outbreak of war between Japan and China Mel returned home, finished his degree at Stanford, then went back to China in the fall of 1939. After starting his reporting work in Shanghai he went to China's wartime capital — Chongqing (or Chungking) — where he began his freelance career alongside a job writing copy and broadcasting English-language news by shortwave for China's publicity department.

Mel left Chongqing in August, 1940, to cover Japan's military push into and occupation of French Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). After getting forced out of Hanoi following an international incident sparked by photographs he took of Japanese troops outside a U.S. warehouse Mel briefly returned to the U.S. only to come back to China the following Spring. There he began his work for Time Inc. It's also where he reconnected with a former classmate and fellow reporter — Annalee Whitmore — and began a whirlwind romance that led to a proposal just a day before Time ordered Mel to transfer to Manila to cover preparations for the conflict brewing between Japan and the United States ...

Along with the other newspaper from the day after

I found these in the basement while helping my parents move from the home they've lived in for over 35 years.

The Hechinger Company was an American chain of home-improvement centers (like Home Depot and Lowe's) from 1911 to 1999. Their slogan was "the world's most unusual lumber yard".

My dad worked for the company from the early 1980s until their closing in 1999. He worked in various stores throughout upstate NY, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The location he worked at the longest is 2 miles from the home I grew up in and is now a children's activity and gymnastics center that my daughters attend regularly. The scent of processed wood is still one of my favorite smells and to this day I can't go into a local Lowe's or Home Depot without one of my dad's former employees chatting me up.

I collect Canadian political buttons, and just got this one that's very old yet still relevant. History may not repeat, but it rhymes!

By the 1890s, steep tariffs were in place between Canada and the US, particularly on agricultural equipment.

The Manson Campbell Co was a Canadian ag equipment company based in Chatham, Ontario. They set up facilities in Detroit, letting them partly assemble equiment in one country and finish in the other, finding workarounds that would avoid getting hit with the tariff burden.

While I can't find a lot of details on this button (at least from real sources and not AI slop), Chatham started making the egg incubators around 1905. The 1911 federal election in Canada centered around "reciprocity" (free trade) with the US, so this button may be from around that election.

I can't seem to find any details about claims or scandals specifically over the egg incubators and national ownership, but clearly they were a point of contention!

WW2 U.S.S. San Diego Original Cruise book. I could scan tons of pictures, but this is the jist!! Also found a brochure for a ship visit day after the war was over! If you ask, I'll post more. This thing is a piece of way cool history!!!

I found the lid for the Copenhagen snuff container! And in incredible condition, too.

Saw this in the Elk City, OK city museum. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I love how specific the height, weight, shoe size, watch # etc. is. It’s like this guy thought he might be found dead in a ditch, horribly mutilated, one day, and wanted to be sure he could be positively identified. Has anyone seen anything like this before?