Day: January 20, 2012

Ever since I was a young fellow in business college, I’ve wanted to write a book like War And Peace but it looks like I’ve instead cobbled together a guide for collecting rubber refrigerator magnets.

For the longest time there were interfering factors like the world wasn’t demanding another War And Peace, and just writing the book in general got in the way of conducting business and other hobbies.

In August of 2004, I came onto a couple of boxes of rubber refrigerator magnets containing maybe 600 of them at an estate sale and accidentally cataloged them in the process of flipping them at eBay. I’ve come to realize that they portray a little snapshot of my favorite era in popular history and collecting, the early 1970s, which we might call When They Changed Everything. They turned out to be Esther’s sister’s magnets; Esther (who was at the sale) told me so. Eventually, I asked Esther what was the story? Six hundred magnets need a pretty big refrigerator. The two sisters traveled, and that’s what they did while they were traveling-they collected rubber magnets. And no, they DON’T all fit on the fridge, the entire display had been displayed on the fridge, the washer and drier, and probably on any other appliances to which they stuck.

If you pay close attention, production of the rubber magnets didn’t last too long. Several makers’ names stand out: Magnetic Novelties of Ellisville, Mo, Magnetic Collectables, Cape Girardeau, Mo, Magic Magnets, St. Louis, Ad Specialties, Union City, Mo, and finally Swib, oddly misplaced at Lisle, Illinois.

Today’s two-dimensional magnets land on peoples’ refrigerators because they’re free and have advertising on them. Yesterday’s THREE dimensional magnets were sold, at about 29 cents each, through outlets other than convenience stores because convenience stores hadn’t been invented yet. They were merchandised from counter displays without packaging, graphics, bar codes or blister packs. Somebody stood there, at somebody else’s sales counter, chatting with a merchant, and picked out something they wished they’d said. Something that would look “appropriate” in their kitchen. It might have had utility: magnets hold up small notes, but for the most part they were a personalization of somebody’s domain, and that was the kitchen (which is not to say that these never made it to other metal places like lunchboxes or tackle boxes or anything made out of steel, but the themes are remarkably innocent if that’s where they were going).

We’re going to include a number of different types here but we’re going to gloss over two of the largest categories, perhaps to appear in later editions of their own. Those are Travel Souvenirs and Sports Logos. Those two seem to be what it’s all about now that rubber magnets are (still) made in overseas factories.

Our categories are: Advice & Humor, Religious, Custom Brand Names, CB Slang, Cartoon Characters, Travel Souvenirs, Autos And Transportation, Sports, and Just Images.

We’re missing some images. We have more records of sales than images, so we have a list of those. That happens when somebody rebuilds a web site and forgets them or when he entrusted a free hosting service with them and they blew up or something. We’re looking for those; they’ll eventually be in future editions.

So we’ve taken what we have, a couple of lists, a few hundred images, and the names of two manufacturers, Magnetic Novelties of Ellisville, Missouri, and Magnet Collectables of Cape Giradeau, Missouri. We’ve also got a few sightings from Swib, of Lisle, Illinois and a couple of other companies and no information about them.

The first time around, we kept no data on who made what, none of their dimensions, and without sifting through thousands of them we don’t know much about their probable color varieties.

We used Google Docs and Picasa Albums to create our content, and because it was easier to work with groups we defined our own categories, although there could certainly be others. For example, we’ve yet to see anything we think is particularly risque, and after all, these could work on a guy’s toolbox as well as on anybody’s refrigerator.

Many of the missing images are travel souvenirs, and we still wonder if those aren’t a category of their own and actually beyond the scope here, but we’re including what we kept. Ordinarily we didn’t seek to trade in those but one day acquired a large batch of them at a local Goodwill Store and hosted those listings’ photos at some third-party hosting service where they subsequently got lost.

Conventions we’ve used are to capitalize everything within the sayings themselves, and to alphabetically use the word “The” rather than to discard it when building lists. A few (CB slang) are numbers (10-4), and for the purposes of alphabetizing those we’ve spelled them out.

Values. What kind of reference would this be without values? Let’s save those for that later edition too. We’ve GOT them, but haven’t added them to the database. This is the free edition. Maybe we can include those in the Premium edition.

In the kitchen, the world’s important topics are different from those in the television or in the computer or in any of the media. Ultimately a few of them are timeless and a few of them are just snapshots: it’s hard to imagine how “Down With Hotpants” could be relevant in the Twenty-First Century, for example.