Old Slot Machines

About 40 years ago a young man named Dave Christensen wrote a book about slot machines and the people who collect them called, Slot Machines - A Pictorial Review. It was a watershed moment in collecting, especially since there wasn't a single library in the US with a book about slot machines on its shelves.

However, as fellow collector and author Richard Bueschel put it, "There wasn't any market, and he couldn't possibly make much money on it. He did it for a simple reason: he liked the machines."

I understand this concept completely because I wrote a book about the history of Nevada's casinos (Nevada's Golden Age of Gambling) when there was no such animal because I simply loved old casinos.

Christensen was working as a free lance artist and doing pin ball game design at Bally when he started his hobby of finding old machines, digging up their history, and producing beautiful fine-line drawings of them.

Illustration from Slot Machines - a Pictorial Review

After doing a half dozen drawings to make posters, Christensen just couldn't stop. He decided to keep hunting and drawing old slots and present them in book form. I found a copy of his book years later and it spurred me on to collect slot machines. His drawings are wonderful and the book is still a treasure to me!

In the 1980's you could find machines in old garages and at estate sales for less than a few hundred dollars. As collecting became more popular prices increased until a reconditioned machine was selling for two or three thousand dollars, making the hobby too rich for most collectors.

I can't say that collecting slot machines is cheap now, but prices have come down. There are plenty of newer machines that only run four or five hundred dollars. If you want older machines, places like ebay do have them listed for less than a thousand dollars.

Anybody out there collect machines?