Collector Items That Aren't Worth Much (knives not included)

My thread, but I forgot to post this:

I used to collect antiquarian books, aka antique leather-bound books. We bought them 1980's - 2010's. We'd go to book fairs in NYC and buy a 200 year old set of Shakespeare, etc. And they were desirable and were believed to hold or gain value as there were lots of people buying these books for personal libraries, etc.

Fast forward to 2013, when we decided to retire to a condo in Cali. Needed to sell most as our condo would not have room for a bunch of books. Could not sell any of our books, even highly desirable ones like Jane Austen and other classics. We ended up giving most away and took tax write-off. Millenials and Gen Z were not interested in collecting old leather books. And books dealers were having trouble selling their own antique books, never mind buying ours. Such is life.

I found the same for stamps, a set of above average Zeppelins was about the same in inflationary dollars as I paid for them in 1977. However, some of my hunting books, especially the fairly recent reprints by Safari Press and Ray Riling, were pretty valuable.
 
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My BIL is a EE, with a MSEE and PhD, he has vintage slide rules and vintage HP calculators. He worked at Bell Labs, AT&T, before consulting for the DoD. He was adjunct professor at a large engineering school, his students had never seen a slide rule.

I recall one high school class that still had a 15 foot long one on the wall for demonstration.
 
In 1985, at the height of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, some of the larger and more prestigious Chicago Hospitals gave them hospital certificates of birth. If your sick child was hospitalized and you brought your child a Cabbage Patch doll, staff would give you a blank hospital certificate to complete with the doll's name, birthdate, gender, and other information. Such is the power of mass marketing.

In 1985 I was working at the Illinois Department of Public Aid's training office at 100 N. Western Avenue in Chicago. This location, at the intersection of two very different ethnic neighborhoods ( or "ghettos" if you prefer) and a huge Catholic Charities emergency shelter, was ideal for training new caseworkers. After a week of basic instruction, trainees were given small and manageable caseloads to learn the work while minimizing the damage done to peoples' lives. It also gave time to get to know our colleagues and become friends with a few, and that is how I learned this little story.

In 1985, a Public Aid recipient brought his sick child in hospital a Cabbage Patch doll, and was given a blank hospital certificate for the child's doll. In those bygone days, the Cook County Clerk's office was very slow at issuing birth certificates and hospital social workers did not usually take applications for Social Security numbers. Said malefactor reported the doll's hospital certificate to my colleague trainee as that of his newborn child and requested emergency Medicaid and Food Stamps. My friendly colleague requested a Social Security number for the doll. SSA has an office in Baltimore which handles these emergency applications: the case worker or social worker receives the SS number is less than an hour, and the applicant gets the SS card in the mail in 3 or 4 days. With the hospital certificate and the SS number, my colleague created a Medicaid case for the doll, and added the doll to the recipient's Food Stamp case. The recipient was told to return with a birth certificate ASAP within 8 weeks, and two reminder letters were sent. After the second reminder, the recipient came in without birth certificate and with this question: "How would it be if there was no child?"

HOW WOULD IT BE?

Illinois notified all hospitals that giving hospital birth certificates to dolls would cost them their license. Public Aid offices were not allowed to accept hospital certificates "until further notice" which turned out to be 10 weeks, and this caused distress and suffering to people with real newborn children who needed Medicaid for the hospital bill and their child's medical care. Medicaid was never billed for the Cabbage Patch doll, and its Medicaid case was immediately canceled. Social Security numbers cannot be withdrawn or rescinded, and the doll still has a Social Security account. There was a small overpayment to the recipient's Food Stamp account, I think the minimum issuance was $20 back then, and that was recouped by deducting it from his next issuance. Obviously he was never trusted on anything again. What he had done was a criminal offense, but these $20 cases are never pursued in court for obvious reasons.

Back in those days, defrauding Public Aid and the Food Stamps program was a sideline business for organized crime. Those cases were never reported in the press. You only heard of them by being professionally involved, and if anyone was caught, you could learn the details with a public record court search. That was not so easy back before public records were on the internet. I know of one case that would make a great film script.

Would a Cabbage Patch doll with a hospital birth certificate and Social Security card have collector value? Your thoughts are welcome.
There is no system that cannot be gamed by someone smart enough…..
 
I recall one high school class that still had a 15 foot long one on the wall for demonstration.
My high school had one of those demonstration models.
The largest one I have is a K&E with 20-inch scales.
When performing analog calculations, bigger means "more precision". The alternative was to have a magnifying glass as the cursor, and some of them did.
 
Speaking of calculators, I still have my Texas Instruments hexadecimal calculator.

It was not a collectible, I used it looking up memory dump offsets etc back in the days of programming on mainframes.
 
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