Dear Readers,

Up till now it was possible to see in Music Boxes For Sale and Musical Toys For Sale all items listed over time, including the Sold items. The idea was that it gave readers looking for an item to buy an idea what was out there and what had been acquired by others.

But slowly the system becomes unworkable by the sheer amount of items sold and in popular categories as Animals Other (than Birds/Bird Cages) it is by now difficult to see what is still available and what has been sold, leading to errors.

Therefore over the next few days I will move the sold (and lost) items out of the Sale collections and maintain them as a database for myself, but will not publish them. That will unclutter the For Sale line-up and hopefully makes it easier for readers, looking for an item or items of interest, to check the listings.

As always we maintain a low price level for all items for sale, compared to prices you may find an eBay or Etsy. In general prices for boxes that have there labels (even if partly) are higher than for unlabelled boxes, as they will be original and give you a better idea of origin, often tunes and quality. Boxes identified as Otagiri, Schmid, Mann, Gorham, Lefton, Berman & Anderson, ANRI will always fetch a small premium because of their much better than average quality, while Price, Anart, Artmark and others generally are of good quality also. We only ship via USPO and payment is via PayPal only.

As we keep our prices low we charge a quite small packaging charge to cover cardboard box and material to protect the item(s) during shipping. The final price is selling price of the item + shipping charges + packaging cost. To get a quote for an all-inclusive price, please email your ZIP code (or whatever it is named in Canada) together with the items you are interested in. Because of shipping charges we mainly ship to continental U.S.A. and Canada, Only if you are interested in 5/6 items or more, would it be worthwhile to check all- in prices to other countries. For Canada and other countries we need to fill out import forms.

Themusicboxman hopes that if you are looking for an item you will include are For Sale listings. Thank you.

On another subject, recently we have seen bubbles of interest out of Russia and Brazil. We take it that our site has been mentioned in some way, may be by clubs interested in music boxes. Welcome!

To all, we appreciate your interest in our virtual museum, that as far as we know, is rather unique in the world, because of the many ways it shows music boxes were commercially sold in the period we cover, 1945 to 1990.

With our best regards,

Themusicboxman

Themusicboxman has to apologize to you for a prolonged  absence in this space, due to health reasons, but is fully back in business again, thank you.

First I would like to draw your attention to the music boxes and musical toys we have for sale, over 400 all together of which over 60 are toys. These are double  boxes and toys that are in My Collection and are offered for sale at really modest prices. Despite the above health reasons I have been able to ship  music boxes over the last few months. The quality of the boxes and toys are described in the site and I try to offer only good or excellent items. Before shipping I check whether the quality is as described and the music working. Please check it out yourself. Because of shipping charges the delivery is effectively limited to the U.S.A. and Canada.

The largest market for music boxes in quantity in the US was in the eighties. That is on average over 30 years ago. It is my feeling, I cannot corroborate it with figures, that the supply from that period is drying up a bit. Some boxes that were sold in quantity are still turning up, as for instance offered for sale on Etsy and eBay, but it is getting more difficult to find items that were of less interest in that period. It has not had a great effect on prices yet, but for some quality boxes as by Otagiri, Jozef or Schmid and some series as Beatrix Potter there is an upward tendency. As you know from the nineties the market switched to China and that is outside the interest for this Collection.

Finally, we still see visitors to our website from a lot of different countries, over a 100 countries in a year, even from war torn countries as Iraq. Also we see from time to time a bubble of interest in some countries, as, I assume, there has been a publication about the site one way or the other; this happened over the last few months with Russia, France and Brazil, at different times. A great welcome to all and thank you for your interest.

THEMUSICBOXMAN

To all our readers and visitors to this site Best Wishes for a

Good, Healthy and Happy 2018.

As usual we start the year by looking back on 2017.

The site was unavailable for 3 days in 2017, as a party that

delivered content protection and was discontinued actually

altered the site destination numbers, the day their contract

ran out , making it impossible to find the site. This information

comes from the provider and they changed it back. With our

apologies.  The internet is full of really bad people and one

cannot be careful enough. Keep your protection up-to-date

and back up files regularly.

Nevertheless we had a record number of visitors, in the full

year over 21,200, mostly new but also approx. 12% of repeat

visitors. Thank you for visiting the site, your always positive

comments on the site, much appreciated.

By countries most of the visitors by far, almost 70%, come from

the U.S.A. And thereafter mostly from English speaking countries.

UK is second with almost 9%, Canada third with almost 5%,

Australia 4th with almost 4% and Singapore 5th with almost 5%.

The first non English speaking country is The Netherlands in 6th place.

The top 10 is rounded out by The Philippines, India, Malaysia (2 more

English speaking countries) and France in 10th place.

In total we had visitors from 133 countries, including some worn-torn

countries like Syria. And countries as diverse as Uzbekistan, Maldives,

Oman and Kazachstan. Interest in music boxes and musical toys is really

worldwide. All of you are welcome and we appreciate your interest in this ,

as we like to call it, Virtual Museum.

And we do sell some Music Boxes and Musical Toys, check our

Sales section, Music Boxes with a number starting with D and

Musical Toys starting with E, over 300 and 60 for each.

Send us an email and we get back to you within 24 hours.

THEMUSICBOXMAN

TO OUR READERS, thank you for checking out the web site and reading this blog.,

The web site is a virtual museum of Music Boxes and Musical Toys from mainly the period 1945 till approx. 1990.The almost 5900 boxes and toys are a good mirror of the variety of boxes and toys produced in this period, but as an estimate and that is my estimate only (there are just no reliable data) represent may be 5% of all different models of music boxes and musical toys produced and marketed in that period and that may even underestimate the numbers. Many model boxes and toys were produced at thousands at a time, but we are counting only the different models, not the absolute numbers (that likely runs in the hundreds of millions). The number of tunes used in those boxes and toys run already into the thousands.

No wonder that many people still have music boxes (musical toys from that period in good condition are by now difficult to find; they were children’s toys primarily, have been played with and in many cases lost their function and were discarded) But many older music boxes come with problems, like stuck winders of the music mechanism (governor and or wheels stuck because of clogged old oil), will wind but not play (likely broken spring) to name some examples  or quit working altogether. Some will have sentimental value as they came from family, were received as a child, are a memory to family members that passed away, etc.

We are getting regularly questions about this and try to help with advice. But please first check out the Maintenance Page in the web site as that contains already most of the advice we can give. Advice , as we do NOT do repairs. And in the Links Page of the web site you will find a number of companies/persons selling (new) replacement music mechanisms and the ones that do repair of music boxes/mechanisms. That list, U.S.A. only, is by far not complete. It is therefore always useful to check the internet and see whether you can find a company or person nearer to you. And my advice is always to call first, explain the problem you are trying to solve and if they say they can help, ask for a cost estimate.

In changing an old not working music mechanism for a new one (if that is possible to do without damaging the box itself), please consider that many times it may not be possible to get the same tune. Tunes reflect the times the music boxes were produced,  what were popular songs in a time that may be tens of years ago (the eighties is the period that more music boxes were sold than any other time, but even that is already on average 30 years ago). There are of course ‘ classic ‘ tunes like Wedding March, Singing in the Rain, Rock-A-Bye-Baby that remain popular over a long period, but most are not. Therefore the same tune in many cases cannot be found as a replacement; remember, thousands of tunes were used in the period we cover and distributors now have at best a few hundred ones on stock.

If there are still questions I will certainly try to help with advice where I can.

Enjoy the site and thank you again,

THEMUSICBOXMAN