Mid-February and the inventory is mostly Los Angeles. If you are a collector and you haven’t managed to grab an L.A. Thomas Guide at some point, you haven’t been looking hard enough.
(SARCASM IMPLIED)
Anyway, here are the last couple of weeks of atlas sales, and this is the first post where I am ignoring Buy It Nows and anything post-1980.
I’m up here in Minnesota, and I am very confident there is still a good supply of 1980s atlases in thrift stores or swap meets to find when I visit the West Coast.
1951 Los Angeles (fair) – $51
1970 Los Angeles-Orange (good) – $20 on 1 bid.
1952 Los Angeles-Orange (good) – $132.50
1956 San Diego (fair) – $75 on 1 bid
This is a great old map book. Thomas bros. 1956 complete street atlas. The pages are old and brittle .You can flip thru it but you have to be careful or it will rip.The 2nd page is loose and not connected to the rings. It is missing page 17/18 one page front and back.page 33 is there but it has a rip. Other than that it is complete. See the pictures for condition and judge for yourself.I tried to show all the major problems. It is a really great piece with alot of great info. pages 66 thru 70 shows all the points of interest for san diego county really cool stuff. If you have any questions let me know and i can look it up.Total of 84 pages. Free shipping is for the US only. I will ship overseas for the cost of shipping. Thanks.
Missing pages are definitely a minus. A collector like me finds the information more valuable than the condition, so if the cover or a single page is detached but included, that’s fine. But one single missing page in a vintage atlas might mean the difference of $100 or a sale and no sale. And yet someone decided to jump on this at $75. It probably would have gone for $20-30 if relisted with no bids.
1946 Renie Los Angeles-Orange (good) – unsold at $49
Relisted starting at $39. Renie is pretty much a secret, but the company’s drafting is very similar in quality to Thomas Brothers and is worth it to collectors.
1970 King-Pierce-Snohomish (fair) – $17
Interesting find. And I know there is a 1966/67 King Pierce atlas currently on sale on eBay for $34.50 starting bid.
From this 1970 atlas it appears to be a two-color scheme (brown and light orange), unlike what you may be used to in L.A. or San Diego (yellow, green, red, purple and orange.)
Printing in more ink colors is more expensive obviously, and therefore correlates to a more limited number or printings for an atlas cover area.
The “fair” condition and maybe the seller’s attitude may have scared off some buyers and $17 seems kind of low for something that is possibly rare. The current auction should end between $50 and $80 – I mean who wouldn’t want to see Seattle’s road-plan from 1966?
Thomas Brothers Maps 