Some coins from the 1850’s.
A Hasmonean-era coin I bought in Israel.
I’m not 100% sure on the age of some of my costume jewelry. I inherited it from my grandmother, and she may have inherited it from her mother. There’s a lot of plastic that probably but not definitely is from the 20s or 30s, and some amethyst that might be from about the turn of the century. I also have a piece of old scrimshaw that would have been an inexpensive trinket when bought, but is probably more valuable now that it’s illegal to carve up new whalebones.
The oldest definitively dated item I have is a small cloth-bound pedagogical edition of Hermann und Dorothea. The copyright page says 1906. I have no particular feelings on Goethe, but I do read German, and the book is old enough that the poem and the discussion questions are all printed in blacketter type. It has been doodled in extensively by someone named Waldemar Stahmer, of 408 D St, Laporte, Indiana, whose scrawlings indicate he was excruciatingly bored in high school in 1916. I found it in a secondhand bookstore in Flagstaff, Arizona, and have absolutely no idea what it was doing there.