bettertchotchkes

[bettertchotchkes]

Prop replica books can come in all shapes and sizes, from the mass-produced to the knocked-off to the meticulously recreated

[bettertchotchkes]

It’s that time of the year again.

[bettertchotchkes]

Roman glass bottle in the shape of a fish, 1st-2nd century A.D.

https://museum-of-artifacts.blogspot.com/?m=1 https://www.instagram.com/p/CaDkvCMI1Tl/?utm_medium=tumblr

[bettertchotchkes]

An illustration depicting the game of Snakes and Ladders, North-west or Western India, early 19th century

Gouache heightened with gold and silver on paper, laid down on cloth, further laid down on later board, with inscriptions in black devanagari script accompanied by English translations in black ink below, framed.

The game of Snakes and Ladders originated in medieval India where it was known as moksha patam, part of a family of games played using dice including chaupar and pachisi. The game is seen as a representation of man’s upward course in religious life. A person can attain salvation (moksha) through performing good deeds or be reborn as lower forms of life due to bad deeds. The ladders in the game symbolise virtues and the snakes are vices. The chart in the present illustration comprises 128 squares, each labelled and numbered in Sankrit with a translation in English below. The game begins at the bottom left corner and finishes at square 124 which is occupied here by a seated figure of the Hindu deity Vishnu. The players ascend the squares through states associated with hell, to moral and spiritual states, finally arriving at the squares associated with salvation and enlightenment. The ladders connect the ‘good’ squares and accelerate the players’ ascent while the snakes connect the ‘bad’ ones reversing their progress.

Sotheby’s

[bettertchotchkes]

[bettertchotchkes]

Commemorating that time during the Cold War when a Russian spy submarine got stranded in Sweden

[bettertchotchkes]

Fortune Telling Machines

Don’t go thinking these old booths are just quaint relics of arcade lore. After all, Tom Hanks was granted a wish-come-true from a fictional Zoltar Speaks booth in the movie Big, so clearly, the games still have some magic juice in them even today. Think of it: a wish for a quarter…it has to be the greatest coin-op bargain of all time.

Fortune-telling machines started to appear in arcades during the 1930’s, and those were years that dropping coins into game slots seemed like the last thing people would be doing with their money. But actually, if a person had a spare penny or two (and on the way home from the newsstand or the grocery, he frequently did), the arcades were a cheap, temporary way to put your real-world problems on the backburner.

The fortune machines were simple: the Mystic Pen, for instance, wrote out a “special” fortune for a player after he inserted a penny. And Exhibit Supply’s An Answer from Beyond had players ask pertinent questions (like, “Will I Marry a Blonde?”) and then glean answers from a picture of the all-knowing Egyptian mummy Ramasees, located just inside the cabinet.

A few years later, arcades saw the coming of more elaborate fortune-telling booths, and in terms of coin-op artistry, these might just have taken the cake. Inside the beautifully finished wood cabinets set behind glass and usually seen from the chest up, there were mannequin “tellers” that weren’t just life-sized, they were also incredibly life-like. If you were going to pay cold hard cash for something as dubious as a randomly distributed fortune, at least someone who looked the part was doing the distributing!

The tellers were frequently costume-jewellery-and-fancy-robe-wearing women, but sometimes these booths had models of bearded men and animals dipping their toes in the pool of prediction, too. The tellers were shown to nod, breathe, blink, and finger mystic objects like tarot cards and tealeaves. And if a teller had a name like “Grandma”…well, who wouldn’t believe the little prediction cards that she doled out? Later fortune telling games had zodiac options—a player twisted the knob to his particular sign—for “added accuracy” (which is, of course, not to say that they weren’t accurate in the first place).

Many of the games built around this time were assembled with parts taken from pre-war arcade games, because in the war years, new parts for non-essential mechanical items couldn’t be obtained. In post-war years, the 50’s and 60’s especially, old-fashioned arcade games came back into vogue and were widely manufactured. There were still mannequins, but they tended not to be as finely detailed as they were in years past. Sometimes just the idea of a fortune-teller was compelling enough. A shiny metal “Swami” napkin holder, for instance, was eerily used in the “Nick of Time” Twilight Zone episode, dispensing a whole lot more than just napkins to its diner patron, played by a young William Shatner.

One of the most memorable players on the fortune-teller block during the 70’s was Bacchus’ Madame Morgana. Here, a woman’s face was projected onto a blank, head-shaped screen, from whence she started to move and talk, and promptly dispensed a player’s fate. When this disembodied favourite did her thing, it looked as if she was speaking, and looking, directly at you.

The Zoltan booths came out in these same years. Again, the bearded wise man inside the glass may not have had that 1930’s-type mannequin authenticity, but he did offer a telephone handset which the player picked up to hear his fortune. This little innovation merged the two disparate worlds of telecommunication and fortune-telling, and—one never knows—may have paved the way for the future of paid fortune tellers, psychic hotlines.

[bettertchotchkes]

In July 2021, MSCHF released Dead Startup Toys. The drop included the Juicero juicer, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) rugged laptop, TheranosminiLab, Jibo social robot, and the Coolest Cooler.

[bettertchotchkes]

It’s a fake store but the products are real and purchasable. 

So is the store really false? Mind blown!

[bettertchotchkes]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jen Taylor (@jen_tayl0r)