UPDATE ON OUR 2026 WORLD’S FAIR SALE(S)

I must apologize–for too infrequent writing on my part–which seems to be a recurring theme. Since I began this blog I have made up for a lack of frequency by posting quite lengthy articles/essays. I hope that I can modify this behavior and share news and shorter articles more often while still sharing information in legthy articles when the need arises.

Last fall I spoke at length about my beginning to work on a world’s fair sale that I was hoping to have ready to post about now–as I write this February 19, 2026. The bad news is it hasn’t yet been posted; the good news is that it will within about 10-14 days, but it won’t be a huge all encompassing sale. As I began assembling world’s fair material I was immediately struck with the fact that I have far too much material for a sale that includes medals, tickets, paper and souvenirs. I can tell you that I absolutely will begin with the first sale on world’s fair tickets followed by the second sale dedicated to world’s fair medals. I truly am quite excited about both.

I have continued to set aside a wide range of world’s fair items tentatively planned for one of these sales and that isn’t exactly very difficult. The items are either tickets/passes or they are medals/tokens. Our clients/customers have always been most interested in medals and tokens. That doesn’t mean there isn’t strong interest in tickets and other items. But simply on a numeric basis, we always have more folks buying coins/medals/tokens. I find that among Columbian aficionados most collectors show strong interest in all things Columbian.

We have decided to begin our world’s fair sales with tickets before medals for a very simple reason. We have what I consider a very comprehensive group of tickets from all fairs but I don’t feel I am done assembling expo medals. I will be posting TICKETS in our store (www.thehistorybankstore.com) beginning this coming weekend, February 21-22. I will announce the sale via email once I have all of the material listed. It is somewhat difficult to be sure exactly when all of the tickets will be in the store and the sale live. I can’t guarantee exactly how many hours I will have available to do this work, and there are always little things that do not go smoothly, causing a minor delay here or there. I generally have written descriptions concurrently with listing the photographs. For this ticket sale I have been writing descriptions for a couple of weeks, handling the photography just before I began writing. I am looking forward to this making the process go much easiers/faster. Just putting items in order in the store can be cumbersome but I do not want to list lots with no attention to that detail. Most of the work for this sale is completed. We will have lots that are just one ticket…and we will have lots that have multiple tickets–anywhere from 5 to a dozen in a single lot. I have not yet written descriptions for the multiple-ticket lots.

Some information on lots and how they’re handled include the following:

1. The majority of lots will be a single ticket and I will not automatically put all tickets from one fair together.
2. Some of the multiple-ticket lots will consist of all tickets being from the same fair, and other group listings will include a cross-section of fairs.
3. The sale will be a fixed price sale, not an auction. You will, however be able to make offers simply by emailing me your offer. I won’t automatically accept every offer and converely, I won’t automatically decline all offers. I personally find it more than a little annoying when a seller on ebay, for example, lists an item for $50 and notes that they will accept offers….then turn down multiple very fair offers….$40, $44, $48. I have seen many, many sellers turn down offers that are 98% or even more of the list price. Naturally, offers should be reasonable. Don’t offer $100 on a $200 lot. I will set all prices based on typical retail prices in the marketplace. But our price will be BASED on that information and our goal is always to list items at prices BELOW those prices available from other sellers.
4. Shipping is based on actual USPS cost which is based on weight and the recipient’s location. I include shipping costs up front and don’t wait until items are sold to calculate prices by where in the U.S. they’re headed; the USPS certainly does but it generally is a modest increase if someone is on the other side of the country versus in the sender’s state. Having been shipping for 45+ years, I can pretty much tell a $5 package from an $8 one…and that there is a relatively small increase based on distnce. Finally, we always combine shipping where possible to save the buyer money. But we frequently see two purchases so dramatically different in size, weight or shape that it may be less oerall to ship the items separately. All sales invoicing goes through PayPal.

All of our subscribers to this blog SHOULD be on our customer master email list. But I spent considerable time at the end of 2025 reviewing the entire list and deleting “old” information where I’ve not heard from the individual for several years. That instantly pared down the list from 2,000+ to 800+. Deleting people was not an arbitrary decision; I considered doing this for some time, arguing with myself whether or not I should “update”clean” the list.

I just decided based on simple logic. With rare exception, if I haven’t had a reason to contact someone or have not heard from them for 3-5 years, I removed them from the list. Further, and more important, everyone on that larger list had received information from The History Bank 2-4 times a year since we last had contact. So I felt it made pretty good sense that if a past customer had 8-10 contacts from us over several years and never acknowledge them, never placed an order or never were in contact for any reason, we deleted them from our msater list. Period.

I’m sure none of these past customers have missed me! And if someone has, all they would need to do is go to our store, contact me through this blorl or look for my listings on ebay, which have been there every week for 27 years! I doubt that I have removed anyone who has interst in doing business with us or has a need/desire to be in touch with us.

YOU are the present and I hope future of The History Bank. I am thinking about ways to move the store and The Journal closer together. Contrary to the general public where publications strive to keep buying and selling separated from reporting news, I want to do the exact opposite. I am writing specifically for the interest and benefit of customers. I plan to provide more sales information in the blog in the future.

The majority of you reading this mid-February have subscribed to The Journal; once your email address is in our database of “customers” and others with whom we do business we will share news and our thoughts with you both through this blog and via specific sales announcements of upcoming sales information. An excellent test right now for you to determine if you are on that master list is to ask if you received our most recent email to the entire list announcing our Civil War sale in December. If you received it, all is right with our world. If you DID NOT receive an announcement of the Civil War sale then your information as a subscriber to The Journal has somehow not made it to our customer list. If this is the case will you please contact me (norm@thehistorybank.com) so we can rectify that? As noted above, we are very close to sending an announcement that our World’s Fair sale is about to go live. I want to stress that it is NOT just a World’s Colunmbian ticket sale, but rather a sale of tickets from more than a dozen different world’s fairs. About 30 of 120 or so lots in the sale will, however, be devoted to the World’s Columbian Expo.

I would encourage you to be in touch with questions and to let us know what you might be looking for. You can always comment on articles in the blog and I appreciate those that we have received.

I hope that all of this information is of value to you and that you will not hesitate to contact us, regardless whether your comments are positive or negative, or most often, in the form of a question about the World’s Columbian Expo or various aspects of our reporting and selling.