Monday, July 1, 2014
Canada Day
Sunny, very hot & humid
Canada Day
Sunny, very hot & humid
The Best Sources of Antique Toy Information
Besides Old Catalogues!
I've seen lots and lots of today's guest's exceptional material on ebay, but but for some reason, I never contacted him. So a few days ago, I contact gdawg ( This person prefers to remain low key-low profile). I waited for a reply and received one, allowing me to use his great ebay listings. Gdawg is a special merchant who happens to sell very old catalogue pages of all kinds of content. For today, I selected specific old pages solely about antique toys. However, when you go to his ebay store, you will be truly amazed and interested!
When I studied professional photography in Providence,Rhode Island (USA), I wanted to add some art to my bare walls. Naturally, I had very little money. One day, I decided to go to a few garage sales just for curiosity sake. Being inquisitive, I came across some very old 1920's or 1930's magazines full of beautiful coloured cars from that era. I purchased the magazines, carefully removed the pages, then mounted the pages on some black matte board. You can mount pages such as these with special material that melts when heated and acts to stick the pages to the mount board. It's especially important to use acid-free mounting board and acid-free tissue because the acid will destroy the catalogue pages, or any other material (e.g. photos). I checked to see if this material still exists and it does. One of the major companies in the film/photographic paper era was Seal, and now it is called Bienfang-Seal . You can still purchase this material. You'll have to read the labels to see how to use this material. If you do go to garage sales, you might be lucky enough to find a mounting press. This is a large-sized heating element made of smooth iron. The larger sized units can mount paper to matt board as big as 3' x 4' (.904 M x 1.22 M).
This is how a page might look. In this case, the Butler Company had
used rose-coloured paper for their 1902 catalogue.
In other cases, very old paper will yellow with age.
What AI did below is to remove all of the colour so as to make "copying" less-attractive.
Gdawg makes a living from selling these fine original catalogue pages.
All of the pages below with a front and back page, thus they appear on this post in pairs.
What I find especially interesting is that on most of the catalogue pages,
there are no identities as to who the manufacturers of the toys are! If you were to search who the manufacturers were, you'd probably find the names of Hubley, Dent, Kenton, Champion, or Kilgore - all large cast iron companies of that time period.
The steam engine was one invention that helped create the Industrial Revolution. Naturally, toys were manufactured to replicate (duplicate) the movements and utility of these exceptional machines of the day.
It's interesting to see cast iron toys being described simply as "iron" toys.
You can see Gong toys here on this page. Of course, the Gong company was a very famous manufacture of this type of push or pull toy.
Cast iron banks were very popular in the 1870's-1920's and the catalogue companies carried plenty of them. These are the more traditional banks, but if you search my blog for "cast iron banks, you will see the decorative banks that are called mechanical banks. A mechanical bank ail take a coin and through a single or multiple set of motions will have characters (people or animals) deposit the coin inside the bank.
This week, just added an excellent post from about these great cast iron toy stoves.
If you've never read my posts, here's something that I always admire. Today,a cell phone company manufacturer will sue another for something such as rounded corners on the case design. However back in the 1900's many of the different cast iron manufacturers would make similar toys, and if the name of the manufacturer was not pressed into the case iron, you would be far pressed to figure out which company made the original toy!
You will have to view these photos in slide mode (Google Blogger).
What you will be amazed at are the prices of these toys at the turn of the 19th century!
Many of the toys above were in fact made in Germany, yt once again,
there is no identity as to the manufacturer.
I mistakenly thought these were carriages for dolls! Of course, had I looked at the prices, I would have realized they were for babies. These are very expensive items for that time. What is even more interesting is that you pay additionally for patented brakes, special wheels and rubber tires!
I left the baby carriages in for this post, because they exemplify the vast diversity of merchandise that was sold through these catalogue companies. Notice also that the above page is page # 700. At the time, many people lived in rural (country) areas of the USA, and the highway system was almost non-existent. As such, people and local stores would receive their mail, food, clothing, and merchandise through the railway system.
If you ever have the change to bid for these exceptional pages or even these old catalogues, by all means do so. And if you find these catalogues at a garage sale, buy them! If you want to learn history in the most interesting manner, this by far (As far as my humble opinion goes) is the best way!
This is my 800th post so far.
I would like to thank all of my readers and contributors
who have helped me and read my blog over the last 3 years.
Thanks for dropping by,
and as always,
have a great part of the day or night,
wherever you may be
Stacey
toysearcher@gmail.com
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