Camera ephemera

[mark_wilson4]

Once I got an E-Bay Rolleiflex with an attached US Navy tag that gave the

owner permission to carry it, but which warned of dire consequences should be

camera have film loaded whilst on a Navy installation.

 

In a case with a gorgeous Zeiss Ikon Ideal, I found a blue card that looked

like a ration card (Eggs, bread, etc) but which I now believe to be a simple

pre-printed weekly shopping list template.

 

Has anyone else found interesting tags, notes, scribbled pencil inscriptions

inside their old cameras? (Besides ID number engraved in the top plate of your

otherwise mint early Canon rangefinder...)

[doug grosjean]

Not in a camera, but in some classic camera accessories.

 

In a flash kit for a Ciro-Flex, a shoeshine cloth lifted from a motel in Gunnison CO.

 

In a book ("Photography with the Speed Graphic" or some such, copyright 1940), were a pair of newspaper clippings. One was an article on taking better photos, and I forget what the other one was because the backside was more interesting: advertisements for a Detroit meat market or grocery. In any case, the prices were amazingly low.

 

Well, and in a Ciro-Flex some film. But only one pic that was decent. Pic showed a toddler (sorta old for diapers, actually) in just a diaper, sitting around in the middle of what looked like a home re-modeling project. There's drywall and sawhorses and a big 5-gallon bucket of spackling compound behind the kid. Kid seemed really out of place.

[randall ellis]

I have the U.S. government hard case (heavy!!) and their original receipt from the maker for a beautiful Korona 8x10 field camera that was used by the TVA. It was a nice treat to find that paperwork inside the case when I opened it up the first time. Oh, there were also a couple of bags of govt. issue desiccant inside the case.

 

- R

[walter_degroot]

related to this are the people wo engrave their social security number on cameras and lansed.

it says on my card " not for identification"

if the lens is stollen, in the past the police could not ID it by the ss number. but any policeman can instantly id it by the drivers licence number. I wonder why people do this.

[nancy s.]

I had a Nikkormat given to me by a guy I knew. He had it since he was 17 and had engraved his SS # in it. He was likely "high" at the time he 'engraved' it.....

 

Fact is, he was "high" when he gave it to me and still "high" when I gave it back to him a few years later....

 

Hmm.. probably spent most of his life between age 13 and 53 "high" on something, and, come to think of it is likely STILL "high...."

 

I don't know if he is still engraving his SS# in things or not.

[michaelging]

I bought a contax camera on ebay with acc. that came in the original box. There was a letter in the box along with the original bill of sale , telling of how the man earned the money for the camera,and where in NYC he had bought it. It was dated 1951, and all the dates and even the expired film was dated no later than 1954. I think the person saved and bought the camera and ether died or put the camera away till I bought it.

[mark_wilson4]

Wow! amazing stories.

I wonder if the TVA camera was used for some of the images by photographers who were to become famous?

[mark_wilson4]

A couple of colleagues and I used to get cameras from an older gent in Johannesburg who was a retired repairman. Once he checked out a Kodak 35 for me and pointed to an adhesive tag inside. He said: "This is the tag of Kodak themselves -Jo'burg facility. They repaired this camera in 1957."

 

On another occasion, I seem to recall that he checked out a complicated camera for someone and spotted a telltale pencil inscription...he himself had repaired the camera, possibly decades before!

[john_shriver]

In the mid-1970's, the Police decided that the solution to the drug addict home robbery problem was having people engrave their license of SS number on "valuables", making them purportedly un-fenceable. (This was in the Nixon era, when the government was busy lying to us. Wage and price controls because "evil Unions were causing inflation" that was really caused by madly printing money to pay for the Vietnam War.)

 

In Maryland, they called this "Operation Identification". They loaned you the engraver, and when you brought it back you got decals to put in the windows, to scare the burglars off to some other house. (Hah!)

 

I engraved things like my Texas Instruments SR-16 calculator -- then a valuable item. Some audio equipment as well. But there was no way I was going to butcher my camera gear!

 

Since then, illegal drugs have gotten much cheaper, in real terms, cutting down the burglary problem in suburbia. (I suspect legal drugs are also much more expensive now...)

[pshinkaw]

I few years ago I purchased an Instamatic Reflex set for the lenses (they were compatible with the Retina IIIS). They came in a nice 1960's style leather gadget bag. When I received the set I found a glued on steamer tag on the bag, a kind of luggage tag glued on to cruise ship luggage at the time. The tag was for an Italian liner called the Raffaello. I Googled the name and found this:

 

http://www.geocities.com/sysiyo/servicer.html

 

The owner of the gadget bag had quite a nice voyage.

 

-Paul

[mark_wilson4]

Once a lady at work brought her old photo album from the forties...I wanted to see if they typically contact printed 6x9, if the prints were done in any particular way, or if I could sense camera idiosyncracies by the print characteristics.

 

There were dramatic images of a relative of hers standing on a mangled piece of nautical bow in a floating drydock, amongst other interesting things. I googled the ship name...a Royal Navy war ship had been leased to South Africa, crewed by South Africans, and sent to the Pacific theatre. The vessel struck a sunken japanese submarine and was damaged, putting it out of action until the war ended.

 

This photo album was a dramatic photo record of the whole incident, conning tower of the Japanese sub included!!! Some of the photos were annotated (not autographic...just penned in ink on the white borders, I think). What a breathtaking find.

[Rob_the_waste]

I don't have anything like this on a camera, but I got an eveready case on the bay from a guy in San Jose, Ca. for a Kodak Signet 35. The address on the label inside was from Fort Lauderdale Fla. I live in Toronto. Go figure.

[patrick j dempsey]

Ironically, these days the SSN is probably MORE valuable than the item, since identity theives can use the number to backtrack your other information and get credit cards and all kinds of goodies in your name. .. you know, now that the number is used universally as an ID number.

 

Ive got a box that had a Minolta A-2 in it with repair details from a repair shop in NY from a few years after the camera was made. Damn shutter STILL doesnt work. My grandfather kept EVERYTHING. Most of the cameras and stuff I got from him has the original receipts with it.

[mdcarma]

<img src="http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c323/mdcarma/Cameras/konica720002copy.jpg">

[chromatic-aberration]

I think the strangest one I've come across was a Kodak Auto 27 at a flea market in California with an address in France written on the inside of the case.

[tony_lockerbie]

I bought an early Rolleiflex with " please return to R. Sheldrick, 20 Northview Ave. Upper Montclair, New Jersey.

 

I hope Mr. Sheldrick doesn't want it back, or he does he will have to come to Australia!

 

This is an early thirties Rollei, so I'll bet it has a story or two to tell.

 

Tony

[peter_naylor1]

Hmmm, well my contribution is a 1962 KMZ Start I bought from a guy from Miami on Ebay US. He had a Hispanic sounding surname, and the Start's original leather case had cyrillic letters scratched on its back that I managed to translate into "MIB" in Roman lettering.

 

So, what's interesting about that, you ask? Well, if you're a Conspiracy Theorist with a vivid imagination like me, the thought did just occur that this Start had come originally from Cuba. Why the "MIB", then? Well, there were certain Russians working there in the early 60s on a project that almost triggered World War Three, so did the "MIB" stand for "Missile Inspection Branch", he mused ....

 

Then again, the camera could have been bought in Leningrad by an elderly Miami tourist at a fleamarket there in the early 80s, and "MIB" were the initials of a former owner called Mikhail Ilyich Bronkovitch or whatever ....... (Pete In Perth)

[skygzr]

I found one of those ubiquitous "how to to take better pictures" books in a camera bag. It had all kinds of notes penciled in the margins. If the owner didn't take better pictures, it wasn't though lack of trying.

 

First prize is an AMC Gremlin! My sister had one of these much-maligned vehicles. It gave great service until one day it fell apart all at once.

 

MIB = Men In Black, of course.

[Rick_van_Nooij]

Apparently I've bought "Capt Bob Lawrence" his Kodak Medalist.

His name was on a piece of embossed plastic tape, made by Dymo these days. It was stuck inside the leather case.

Found a roll of Belgian panchromatic film inside the camera which after enquiry was returned to the family. They probably couldn't recover anything from it because I never heard from them again.

 

Inside the carry case of my Zeiss Ikon Nettar there was an address in England of the previous owner, probably from the 1940s.

 

Nothing quite so interesting as other finds mentioned here.

 

Interested to see what I find in my Kodak PH-324 when it arrives

[randall ellis]

Mark,

 

I know that the camera was used in the 50's and 60's by the TVA, and that it was sold sometime after that, but I don't know when exactly. I do know that it was sold at govt. auction to a collector and became part of his collection. It was well cared for and was apparently regularly inspected when it was owned by the govt. and was well cared for in the collection as well. I feel very fortunate to have gotten it and would certainly love to know more about it's history, but given that it was sold from the collection of someone who is now deceased, my guess is that any provenance other than what I have now is lost to the sands of time... Still, it sparks the imagination to wonder!

 

- R

[mike_gillespie]

Isnt it amazing people will scratch ss numbers or drivers licences on good quality cameras that have existing serial numbers on the outside already? I am also a gun collector , and have seen multiple instances of extremely valuable guns defaced in this manner, sometimes adjacent to the manufacturers serial number, sometimes on the frame sides of early Winchesters in large letters, reducing the value by one half or more.

[pshinkaw]

You can take the SSN from a camera and run it thru the Social Security Death Registry website. If the owner of the # is deceased, it will give you his/her name.

 

I have purchased cameras on e-Bay whose original owners passed away as little as a year before.

 

-Paul

[r.c._booth]

Some years ago I bought a beautiful double stroke M3 and Summicron from an estate that had the owner's SS number etched in both. And to top it off he etched his name "Peanuts Walters" on the top plate too.

 

I also have a Contax III with a handsome brass name plate riveted to the back with the sellers name and address: "Beckman & Co, Maracaibo, Cucuta".

 

RCB

[Dustin McAmera]

I've posted this before: I have a <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00Cg3k">Zeh Goldi with a permit</a> for the previous owner to have it on RAF premises in 1944.

[mark_wilson4]

Amazing Goldi item! (Funny I don't remember it, as I contributed to the thread).

 

Peter, have you gotten results from your Goldi? My no-name version (American from you-know-where) is beautiful...immaculate. It has a Corygon lens and compur shutter. However, results have been poor because of light through the Efke backing paper (unique to this camera). Also, it seems to be a dust generator, like my Ikonta 520...an unending and invisible supply of tiny specks from somewhere.