These days, you'd think that I would have a lot more time to read....however, with the lines blurred between my work space and office space within the confines of my home I tend to spend a lot more time working which leaves a lot less time for reading.  I do love to read....magazines, manga, books, blogs...you name it, one of my escapes is reading and if you can throw in a fireplace to sit in front of, I am in heaven.  The Japanese are avid readers as well and bookmarks are a staple for any Japanese kid.  In the 1950s and 1960s, bookmarks were often given away as promotional items inside monthly children's magazines as is the case with this bookmark below.  The Manga King （まんが王）magazines were extremely popular from the early 1960s to 1970s and included this Yokozuna Wakanohana bookmark in a magazine from likely 1960 or 1961. This is the only one I have seen in almost two decades of collecting attesting to its rarity...much like the rarity in my reading time these days.

Stay safe out there and thanks for stopping by. 

Recently, I stumbled across these somewhat unusual "cards" in the form of bookmarks.  Actually, they are bookmarks, but still a fun paper collectible.  I have only ever seen these four cards alluding to how rare they are.  I usually do an occasional search for sumo bookmarks and just happened to time it right for these to be at auction.  It looks like these were issued in uncut sheet that kids would have to cut out and were likely issued in kids magazines which were really popular in the 1950s. I love the black look on these.....pretty sharp looking which is why I picked them up.  Notice the uncut hole at the top where the bookmark string would go in...I'm wondering if the string came within the magazine as well.  Oh well, what do you think?  Anyone else collect oddball sports ephemera?




Have a great weekend!!!

My fascination with 1960s Japanese yukata cloth bolts continues.  The ones that I collect have bromide photographs attached to the packaging to show the famous person or star wearing the exact pattern as the actual cloth.  They are pretty cool and so far I've managed to gather about 15 or so of them from the 1960s.  For some unknown reason, they were only produced in the 1960s.

I recently picked this one up and was wondering if any of the Japanese Baseball gurus could tell me who it is.  He is from the Yomiuri Giants...that is about all I can tell at the moment.

By the time you are all reading this, I will have ran in my first (and last) marathon.  Something that has been on my bucket list for many years and I was finally able to get to the long training involved in making it happen.  I've come to realize my body is too old at this point to make long-distance runs a habit, but I do enjoy the 6-10 mile run limit a lot more than these multiple-hour runs.  Speaking of old I happened upon this old circa 1918 bookmark card (B-series) of Ozeki Asashio.  Bookmark cards are actually one of the hardest series to find in all eras and this one has had it's fair share of love.  Asashio was an active wrestler for over 16 years and retired as an Ozeki in 1919 and the old age of 35, something very uncommon for wrestlers these days.  He died at the ripe, old age of 82, which was even more uncommon among wresters of that era.

This bookmark card has a nice hand drawn image of Asashio in his mawashi with stylistic flower images on both the front and back.  The back clearly indicates this is a Shiori "bookmark" with a nice, large gunbai image below that.  It measure 1 3/8" x  5 3/8".

This knocks out 1/5th of one of 2017 collecting goals which is to discover and catalog 5 pre-1960 sets.  Here is an interesting pair of bookmark cards that I picked up over in Japan recently.  It is from a bimonthly magazine called Manga King (漫画王).  This was given away in the annual 1959 New Year's edition and measures approximately 4 3/4" x 4 3/4" and printed on thin cardboard.  I've never seen this set before and it has a previously uncatalogued card of Yokozuna Wakanohana and an uncatalogued second-year card of the baseball Hall of Famer Shigeo Nagashima of the Giants.  The back is printed in purple ink and has calendars for the first 6 months in 1959.  There is also a line down the middle to cut the card in half so you get two separate bookmarks.  These type of sets were fairly common in the 1950s and 1960s as give aways in magazines....especially in the elementary school magazines.  Hopefully there are more cards to this set out there.  Here are the cards and the sample cover of the April 1959 magazine.