Wednesday November 5, 2014
Sunny and mild
Sunny and mild
A 1937 Tippco Catalogue
Part I
I like to buy old or reproduced toy catalogues. I use them as references, and I like to try and find toys to match up with the illustrations of photos. The Antique Toy Collectors of America is a group of people dedicated to collecting and discussing antique toys. One of the great things about this group is that they reproduce old and antique original toy catalogues that are then sold at their conventions. I'm not sure if this is an annual event or more infrequently.
I purchased this reproduction for $ 20.00 US on ebay. The trouble now with ebay is that 2 drastic things have changed, causing the final price of anything arriving to your house to be 2-3 times more expensive that the original price. First ( at least for Canadians) is the fact that the Canadian Government pressured ebay to start collecting taxes at source (the seller on ebay). Even when I can cross the border into the USA by car, and buy a certain amount of groceries or items, I do not ever have to pay taxes. Buy buy 2 $ 5.00 US toy catalogue booklets, and I have to pay $ 1.55 US. THe second problem is that ebay sellers selling to Canada have to use ebay's global shipping. For my catalogue today, that cost me another $19.00 US. But the worst of all is the fact that when I pay via Paypal (an ebay company) , I am charged a Premium on the exchange rate for the books, the taxes, and the shipping. The $ 10.00 booklets cast me $43.50 by the time they arrived at my house, here in Canada!
The first thing that I noticed in the Tippco 1937 catalo is the depth and assortment of toys. Remember this was 1937, the world is in a deep depression, hundreds of millions of people are out of work ( A reason for Hitler's rise to power), and Tippco is making lots of toys. My question is who was buying the,, and where did the average person get the money to buy them. I always wondered about the "Great Depression". Sure the poor suffered tremendously, yet fancy cars, clothing accessories were being sold and purchased, sports flourished with people paying to go to football and baseball and soccer games, and life went on.
I've enlarged the pages of this catalogue so that you can read the print as well. It's best to view these scans in Blogger's slide view mode.
The catalogue was reproduced in a large size. I don;t know if the original catalogue was this big, but the dimensions are 11 1/2" (H) x 9 3/8" (W) or 317 mm x 237 mm.
In 1933, the owner at the time, Mr Philip Ullman had to flee to England because he was Jewish. A non-Jew was selected by the Nazi Government to run the company. The rest, I leave for you to read.
European toys, including Tippco were universal in demand. As such, the catalogue was reproduced in 4 languages -German, English,French, and Spanish.
I only scanned 2 pages of airplanes to present to you. However, the catalogue of 1937 has 12 pages
of airplanes, including 1 page of Zeppelins.Also, the Nazis used toys as a propaganda mechanism to lure children and to indoctrinate them into the Nazi mentality. It wasn't uncommon for children to tell on their neighbours to the Nazis and Gestapo, or to want to enlist in the party and army as soon as they could.
Below are 2 scanned pages of military toys from the catalogue.
One thing to notice is that many of the toys had lights that were operated by battery.
Earlier, I mentioned that the depth of the toy catalogue was quite impressive. Considering the high unemployment in 1937, why would a toy company make so many similar toys? Below is a page of 4 fire trucks. However, the catalogue has 5 pages of these firetrucks, with a total of 17 in all. Why?
This was just Post I (Part I) , and I plan to add at least 1 more post.
Of course, my personal favourite is to find old toys, match them up with the catalogue photos, and post!
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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