Today the mail brought a wonderful antique that I found on eBay last week: the Linguaphone English Course, recorded in 1929! This is the edition for speakers of Spanish, and the condition is far from pristine, but the set is nearly complete: seventeen 78 rpm records (all unbroken), a course book with the texts of the records, an English-Spanish vocabulary, and an instruction book in Spanish (this unfortunately is missing a number of pages), all in a carrying case (which is falling apart). Now I can learn to speak English!
Okay, my REAL reasons for buying this are Lesson 20 "At the Tobacconist's" and Lesson 30 "Wireless":
They're the earliest audio recordings of an Oxford professor named J.R.R. Tolkien.
And no, he doesn't say, "I will not buy this record, it is scratched." Nor does he say, "My hovercraft is full of eels."
EDIT: Replaced the photo of the individual records with a larger one and revised my description of the set.