Another milestone, of sorts

Back when I was following the glass float collecting world, there was a gentleman from Iowa named Geno who scavenged flea markets and antique shops looking for small glass floats (used to keep fishing nets buoyant).  He wanted to corner the market on them, not realizing that, in the past, the Japanese fishing industry turned out glass floats like Hershey turns out Twizzlers.  Every few days, he would post another breathless find (he called them "fish balls") to the group, crowing about how he had taken another dealer to the tune of $5 to $10 for a priceless treasure.

For those of you hopelessly lost, here is a picture of glass floats of the round, smaller variety, with a golf ball in the lower right for size comparison.

The only truly valuable glass floats are intact (unbroken) ones of much larger diameter (which are rarer, even if the same quantities of each were made originally, because their size makes them less likely to survive), and those of a rolling pin shape, generally regardless of size (again, a numbers game).  They are fun to search for if you live on a deserted island (because generally they wash up free), less meaningful if they are found in a thrift shop, since they were likely manufactured solely for the retail trade.

None of this has anything to do with the current humblebrag which arrived in the mail today, a Sanborn RPPC of a long-gone Big Thompson Canyon cottage camp known as Cedarmont.

There is nothing spectacular about the rarity or condition of this postcard, rather, it represents another one of those achievements that pushes this collection into the realm of the "never thought I'd"s. 

Sanborn collectors pursuing completion of one or more of the "major series" (those series with over 300 postcards comprising a completed set) chunk the Sanborn alphanumeric codes into blocks of 100s, just for ease of keeping track of a growing number of postcards, and to keep a running total of percentage completion without having to resort to a calculator.  For example, the postcard pictured above is R-1516, which would be included in the R-1500s block (from R-1500 to R-1599).

As an aside, most of the postcards in the R-1500 block were first produced after World War II (this particular image was first produced during WWII) yet the R-1500 block is very unusual compared to surrounding blocks (R-1400 and R-1600 blocks) because around 20% of the original negatives used to produce postcards in this block date to much earlier, even as early as the late 1920s.  This "recycling" of images is confusing to modern collectors, and I don't see how it could have avoided confusing postcard consumers after the war - Wouldn't they recognize images of downtown streets filled with 30-year-old automobiles as somewhat dated?  Wouldn't they avoid something that looked like it came from a generation back?  Would you purchase a box of Cheerios at Safeway that looked like this?  Not as an antique, but as a consumable?

The reason this postcard is any kind of "accomplishment" is because, in the R-series, it is extremely difficult to achieve 70% or greater completion in any block - indeed, towards the end of the R-series, is it nearly impossible to get over 50% completion.  You can scroll back through earlier postcard entries, when I mentioned that Bill Berry is considered the king of collectors who share their information, because in the Sanborn real-photo postcard R-800 block, before he stopped collecting, he was able to obtain 77% completion (77 of the 100 total different views Sanborn produced).  At that time, I had yet to obtain even 70% completion in any of the Sanborn R-series blocks (from R-700 to R-1700).  When you consider that Sanborn often just printed 25 of a particular view, and that was it, that was the total he ever printed, and that was 70+ years ago, for something that was made to be discarded at the receiving end, this is quite remarkable.  Like shooting a three-pointer from the opposite three-point line remarkable.  50 consecutive times.

I said a year or so ago that, no matter how hard I try, I will likely never achieve 77% completion of the R-800 block, and I still stand by this assertion.  But this R-1516 postcard at least ties me with Bill, sort of - I now own 77 of the 100 postcards produced in the R-1500 block.  I'm not sure if this is the same accomplishment, as the second person to summit is never as famous as the first, especially when it's on a completely different mountain.  In any event, I'm the first that I know of to obtain 77 postcards in the R-1500 block, and I'm happy to discover if other R-series collectors surpassed this a long time ago. 

In other words, is this accomplishment a lavender-colored rolling pin, or a 3-inch sea-mist bauble?