Home: 300 pieces of ocean liner, cruise ship, and cargo

Collecting Ocean Liner, Cruise Ship, and Tramp Steamer Memorabilia

An acquaintance of mine came into quite a nice collection of ocean liner, cruise ship, and tramp steamer paper items a couple of years ago. The collection includes deck plans, photo brochures, photo booklets, schedules, fare sheets, newspaper clippings, and a couple of books. There were some 300 items or so.

Well, he is not a collector. Nor am I for that matter. So we agreed that I would take posession of these items and look into selling them. We made a loosely contracted verbal consignment agreement that I would give him a small percentage of the net sales once they were sold. All well and good so far.

Now...,In order to establish a possible value for an item so that I might be able to put on it a fair price that an avid collector might be willing to pay, I find myself having to investigate the histories of the ships. Did you know that some of the cruise ships that sail up and down the Alaskan coastline nowadays were British Corvettes during the second world war? Don't know what a British Corvette is? Neither did I!

I could very easily become an enthusiast, an avid collector of ocean liner, cruise ship, and tramp steamer paper items. These ships have so much beauty, character, and history. There provenance alone is worthy of dedicated study.

Since I cannot devote the time to this interest that I wish I could, I am going to continue with my contractual obligation to sell the collection. All the items are listed on the linked pages. I hope to install a search module soon, but for now just know that the items are not quite in alphabetical order. They are sorted kind of generally by the company that owned the ship at the time a particular document was created.

Grading. I used the attached grading guidelines to determine the condition of each item. As subjective as the method is, I tried to be critical and err on the maybe-it's-not-quite-as-good-as-it-looks side. You will notice that many of the items are listed as Mint. That is because, to my inexperienced eye, they look brand new.

Many items are not yet graded; I will be working on those as time permits. The same with images; I have some ready, but will load them as I can.

Please contact me if you have any interest in any of these items. I'm sure we can work out pricing that is equitable for each of us. Want the whole banana boat? Make a reasonable offer.

Thanks for visiting.