Old Marples or Other Catalog?

[D_W]

Does anyone have an old catalog from a tool dealer that has parallel and tapered irons in it?

I see the 1938 catalog at toolemera, but it's a bit too new to learn much.

Also, since I'm not familiar with the currency notation, what does it mean when someone marks a price as 16/6 catalog? 16 shillings and six pence?

 

[Argus]

Pre-decimal currency featured Pounds, Shillings and Pence. Sometime written as £.s. d (or LSD - librae, solidi, denarii).

There were twelve pence to the Shilling, twenty Shillings to the Pound - therefore 240 pence per pound.
It was written in many different ways.......
Prices under a pound were written as your example: 16/6, or 16/-6.
Over a pound and it came as for example, £1:16s:0d, 36s, or 36/- etc.
Then, for high-class items, there were Guineas ..... which were multiples of 21s, or 21/- or £1:1s ..... etc. and half-Guineas..... which were at 10/60d.

Racehorses and certain other livestock are still traded in Guineas.

It had it own language ........sixpence was a 'tanner', a shilling was a 'bob' you could get a pint for 'oneandtwo' in the late 60s (1/2d), '5 bob' was a 'dollar' and 10 bob was 'half a bar'. There was more, much more that all went out of the window with decimalisation.

Hope it makes sense......some of us miss it, still. If nothing else, it taught us to add up!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

10/60d? Of course, you forgot farthings (fourthings) which were a quarter of a penny. So you could buy something that was £1 - 1 - 11 3/4d. They went out of circulation in 1960, although they weren't used for several years before that

 

[Argus]

10/60d? Of course, you forgot farthings (fourthings) which were a quarter of a penny. So you could buy something that £1 - 1 - 11 3/4d. They went out of circulation in 1960, although they weren't used for several years before that

Yes, farthings: had a Wren on the back of the coin.

There were, believe it or not, quarter-farthings..... 16 to the penny. long, long extinct.
Back in those days (1960s) the rarest coin in circulation was the shilling piece, because it went into the gas meter and people held onto them..... you hardly ever got one in your change!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I used to have an off licence in the late '70s, and the coin for the meter then was the 50p. My shop was in the middle of a council estate so the vast majority had meters. When they were emptied I could take £100 an evening in 50p's from their rebates - and then three days later they'd all be back asking for 50p's for their meters - they didn't have brains enough to keep a few back. I used to use £50 at a time of 20p's - they didn't fit anything so it was the only way I could keep any change.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Interesting - that's the first time I've heard ten shillings being called half a bar, or five shillings being called a dollar. I was 17 went we went decimal - we should have done as Australia, and gone the whole hog and decimalised everything at once ... or nothing.

 

[MIGNAL]

Pre-decimal currency featured Pounds, Shillings and Pence. Sometime written as £.s. d (or LSD - librae, solidi, denarii).

There were twelve pence to the Shilling, twenty Shillings to the Pound - therefore 240 pence per pound.
It was written in many different ways.......
Prices under a pound were written as your example: 16/6, or 16/-6.
Over a pound and it came as for example, £1:16s:0d, 36s, or 36/- etc.
Then, for high-class items, there were Guineas ..... which were multiples of 21s, or 21/- or £1:1s ..... etc. and half-Guineas..... which were at 10/60d.

Racehorses and certain other livestock are still traded in Guineas.

It had it own language ........sixpence was a 'tanner', a shilling was a 'bob' you could get a pint for 'oneandtwo' in the late 60s (1/2d), '5 bob' was a 'dollar' and 10 bob was 'half a bar'. There was more, much more that all went out of the window with decimalisation.

Hope it makes sense......some of us miss it, still. If nothing else, it taught us to add up!

Brilliant idea was decimalisation, absolute genius.
I'm outta here coz there's plenty with big heavy wooden walking sticks! Still, they'll have to catch me and they ain't getting any younger.

 

[Bm101]

Edit.... I just had a horrible thought the link I posted might not be in the public domain. I'm fairly certain it is but I don't have time to check right now. I'll pm it to you just in case. If Andy confirms at some point it is, I can post it up again. Sorry! But just in case.

Edited again: Just got back from picking me lad up and checked the Taths webpage and it's on there so here it is.
Sorry about that.
1928 version Page 25 onwards

http://taths.org.uk/images/PubCat/TathsMarples1928.pdf


Cheers
Chris

 

[Vann]

Pre-decimal currency featured Pounds, Shillings and Pence. Sometime written as £.s. d (or LSD - librae, solidi, denarii).

There were twelve pence to the Shilling, twenty Shillings to the Pound - therefore 240 pence per pound.
It was written in many different ways.......
Prices under a pound were written as your example: 16/6, or 16/-6.
Over a pound and it came as for example, £1:16s:0d, 36s, or 36/- etc.
Then, for high-class items, there were Guineas ..... which were multiples of 21s, or 21/- or £1:1s ..... etc. and half-Guineas..... which were at 10/60d....

Over here (NZ) we 'decimalised' in 1967 (I was 11yo).
Some variations on what you described: two pounds, two shillings and eleven pence was written as £2/2/11, or £2 2s 11d (less common); two pounds, two shillings and no pence was more often written as £2/2/- than £2/2/0 (or £2 2s 0d)
Two and a half pennies was "tuppence ha'penny" (hey-penny).
There was the odd farthing around, but I never experienced them in use (we had our own coins minted, but we used the UK farthing).
We had a half-crown coin (2/6d). We never had a crown (5/-) except for a few commemerative issues.
1d was a penny;
2d was tuppence;
3d was thruppence;
12p was a shilling or a bob;
2/- was a florin.
I think a tanner was 10/-;
20/- was a quid;
Guineas were known, but not in common usage (there was no Guinea coin or note here).

That's my tuppence worth #-o

Cheers, Vann.

 

[lurker]

A farthing was/is the perfect size to put under the clamping screw on a marples mitre guage

A tanner = 6d

 

[lurker]

16/6 = 82.5p

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Our tanner was 6d - yours (NZ) might have been different, of course. Guineas were last minted in 1813.
Years ago it was common to save sixpenny pieces in Dimple Haig bottles, the three sided ones. When they were no longer minted, with a view to their withdrawal in 1980 (when they were worth 2 1/2p) They made the necks of the bottles slightly small so they could no longer be hoarded in them.

 

[Vann]

...A tanner = 6d

Okay, I wasn't sure on that one.

So what was ten shillings called? Half a quid? Ten bob? - Both IIRC, but I thought it had it's own name, not a multiple of something else...

Cheers, Vann.

 

[D_W]

Edit.... I just had a horrible thought the link I posted might not be in the public domain. I'm fairly certain it is but I don't have time to check right now. I'll pm it to you just in case. If Andy confirms at some point it is, I can post it up again. Sorry! But just in case.

Edited again: Just got back from picking me lad up and checked the Taths webpage and it's on there so here it is.
Sorry about that.
1928 version Page 25 onwards

http://taths.org.uk/images/PubCat/TathsMarples1928.pdf


Cheers
Chris

Thanks!

Looks like the parallel irons are about 50% more, but in the grand scheme, the irons are fairly inexpensive ( a dozen for 35-50 shillings). I'd expect they would be slightly more (parallel than tapered) because the biases that exist in favor of the maker (the hollow back on the iron, etc) and that allow for perfect function with a little bit of imperfection - those have been removed.

 

[Bm101]

My pleasure. Glad I could help a little. Of course, it's actually Andy who deserves the thanks. He pointed me in the right direction originally. :wink:

 

[Bm101]

And btw.... Just scrolling through and saw this modern newfangled trend (1928!) and thought I'd share it. ( :-" ) And yes, it's just for a giggle, let's not all go off the deep end and off topic on another endless, useless debate but it made me chuckle. And yes I can see it says 'for amateurs'. Seems Marples Guys had my number 47 years before I was born! :shock:

At least it can no longer be called new fangled I suppose.

 

[D_W]

I can't see the picture above.

I did notice in the catalog that the turkey oilstone is available, but it's priced almost twice as expensive as a genuine washita stone.

 

[AndyT]

Hi everyone - I'm now back from a day out and can join in the fun.

Chris - it's nice to see the 1928 and 1938 Marples catalogues getting known and used more widely. I was lucky enough to buy them both for very reasonable prices and scanned them because there is so much useful information in them - they deserve a wide readership.

A few extra points:

Within a single catalogue it's safe to look at relative prices and see that, for example, parallel irons cost 50% more than tapered. But these two catalogues were wholesale catalogues, issued to trade customers. Most would have been businesses with retail shops but I expect big operations such as railway companies would also have dealt direct. The clue is that most items were priced in dozens. An ordinary user would not want to buy a dozen plane irons and would not have been able to. There's also a reference in the introduction to Marples' "many trade friends".

Even then, the printed prices would not have been the actual prices paid by most customers. It was normal to issue extra sheets showing discounts or plussages to be applied to the printed prices. These would vary across different customers - the best customers got the best deal - and across time, so an old printed list could still provide a 'base' price for calculating current prices for a decade or more. (It was even possible for a plussage and one or more discounts to be applied at the same time, making the calculations complicated fun. I remember this as still being current practice when I worked as a buyer in the 1980s.)

Some catalogues were issued to end users and gave retail prices for single tools or were unpriced.

We are fortunate in that a great many old catalogues have been preserved - the Hawley Collection has thousands - though prices paid by collectors for the few that come to market seem to be rising fast. So for most of us, the answer lies in scanned versions.

Some of these are freely available, others less so.

If you want to look further back, scans of quite a lot of catalogues - including Marples in 1903 and 1921 - are available from TATHS. You can buy them on CD in their shop here - http://www.taths.org.uk/shop - you will want CD no 3. Alternatively, if you sign up as a member, you can download most of these catalogues for free.

 

[graduate_owner]

Just a couple of coins not yet mentioned. There was the florin (a two shilling piece), the half crown ( 2/6 ) and the crown ( 5/- ). The oniy crowns I remember were comemorative ones like the Churchill crown. We didn't use the word florin, it was just two bob. And of course there was the multi sided brass coloured three penny coin - ( or thruppeny bit as we used to call it).

K

Edit - just read Vann's post from NZ. Looks like they had a similar system to us.

 

[D_W]

Hi everyone - I'm now back from a day out and can join in the fun.

Chris - it's nice to see the 1928 and 1938 Marples catalogues getting known and used more widely. I was lucky enough to buy them both for very reasonable prices and scanned them because there is so much useful information in them - they deserve a wide readership.

A few extra points:

Within a single catalogue it's safe to look at relative prices and see that, for example, parallel irons cost 50% more than tapered. But these two catalogues were wholesale catalogues, issued to trade customers. Most would have been businesses with retail shops but I expect big operations such as railway companies would also have dealt direct. The clue is that most items were priced in dozens. An ordinary user would not want to buy a dozen plane irons and would not have been able to. There's also a reference in the introduction to Marples' "many trade friends".

Even then, the printed prices would not have been the actual prices paid by most customers. It was normal to issue extra sheets showing discounts or plussages to be applied to the printed prices. These would vary across different customers - the best customers got the best deal - and across time, so an old printed list could still provide a 'base' price for calculating current prices for a decade or more. (It was even possible for a plussage and one or more discounts to be applied at the same time, making the calculations complicated fun. I remember this as still being current practice when I worked as a buyer in the 1980s.)

Some catalogues were issued to end users and gave retail prices for single tools or were unpriced.

We are fortunate in that a great many old catalogues have been preserved - the Hawley Collection has thousands - though prices paid by collectors for the few that come to market seem to be rising fast. So for most of us, the answer lies in scanned versions.

Some of these are freely available, others less so.

If you want to look further back, scans of quite a lot of catalogues - including Marples in 1903 and 1921 - are available from TATHS. You can buy them on CD in their shop here - http://www.taths.org.uk/shop - you will want CD no 3. Alternatively, if you sign up as a member, you can download most of these catalogues for free.

Thanks, Andy. I hadn't thought of the end purchaser at those prices, but many or most of ours are also in the same format over here - price by the dozen. I don't know what the typical markup would've been, but small items one would guess 50-100% (this one would, at least). Even at that, the irons are fairly cheap compared to what we pay these days. I seem to recall (and didn't browse back through the catalog) that things like files were fairly expensive, relatively.

Because of questions lately that folks have emailed me re: the parallel irons and why they were more expensive (the common modern answer is "because they're better"), and I think that even more so now, when folks price less common parallel irons, even the old ones are sold at high prices if the irons are in good shape. I'd have to assume that the extra cost was probably desired by the makers of infill planes who don't have the issue of a tall wear to deal with, and who would want to have an iron consistent thickness left to right and end to end to ensure the tight mouth they were making would not run into problems down the road.

Just speculating, though. The infill planes probably have a better survival rate than all-wood planes, too, due to the outlay and secondary market value these days - though at least we are starting to see the common infills over here in greater quantity and more sensible prices.