Tennis spoon disaster and Maltese Cross spoon

After the slight upturn in fortune with the kingfisher spoon, I tried my luck with the tennis spoons on eBay. Considering they are EPNS (electro-plated nickel silver) and have a (little) bit of age, I thought I'd start the auction at £4.99 which, in hindsight, was a mistake. With smaller antiques it looks to me as though you have a far better chance of selling if you begin low - a starting price of £0.99 would probably have attracted more attention and I may try that strategy in future.

So, after paying the listing fee of £0.27, my running total is now £3.04 (plus a box of 39 spoons)!

I've tried to find out a bit more about the Maltese Cross spoon. It seems that '917' means it contains 917 parts of silver per thousand. So my spoon is definitely silver but not as pure as Sterling which contains 925 parts per 1000.

I've taken a couple of photos so if anyone can give me an idea of age or, even better, value, I'd be very grateful. As I said before, the marks are, from left to right, a Maltese Cross, '917' and 'F'. There is a final mark which is incredibly difficult to work out - it may be of a ship with a square-shaped sail but after staring at it through a magnifying glass for half an hour I came away thinking it could be a big, badly stamped 'H', a rugby goal or a cheese slice...

Back from a break - tennis memorabilia

It's been eight months since my last post. Demoralised after my first 'antique' - a vintage 'Lexicon' game - failed to make a profit - I lost momentum and put the whole idea on the backburner.

However, a purchase of a 'job lot' of old spoons for £8 has revived my interest. The box contains 40 spoons from (I presume) practically worthless 'souvenirs' celebrating cities such as Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Johannesburg to more intriguing items such as a twisted-stem foreign silver spoon. The latter has what appears to be a Maltese Cross finial (the hallmark on the back also features the cross and reads '917 F').


There were also silver-plate spoons with animal finials (a panda, a fox and a kingfisher). I listed the kingfisher spoon on eBay and it made £1.99. Take off £0.27 listing fee and the profit on that was £1.72 - not bad considering I still have 39 spoons left! So my running total is £3.31 + 39 spoons (£9.59-£8 job lot+£1.72+39 spoons).

Among the collection were also six tennis spoons which were probably presented to winners or runners-up in tournaments. They are all EPNS, engraved on the back with 'P.B.T.C' and date from 1960 through to 1973. P.B.T.C could possibly relate to Purley Berry Tennis Club in Surrey. I love sports memorabilia - I'm particularly interested in old golf books and am intrigued to find out whether anyone will be interested in a little bit of tennis history (even though we're only talking about items from 40 or 50 years ago).

I've found a website that looks like a great resource for spoon information; it also has a highly informative glossary.http://www.antiquesilverspoons.co.uk/glossary.htm