The Ives, Blakeslee & Williams Company

Monday, July 17, 2017
Overcast with rain forecast
20 C  68 F

The Ives, Blakeslee

& Williams Company

   A reader wrote to me last week asking if I had more scanned photos of an Ives, Blakeslee & Williams Company catalogue. He had visited my blog, and had found 3 posts on the company . I had written 3 posts about the American toy distributor company on September 30, 2016. I hadn't scanned the catalogue, but for a selection of images from the catalogue. The catalogue that I have is a June 1965 reprint of the Original 1893 catalogue ( 124 years ago).

  I didn't have the entire catalogue scanned, so I decided to scan it. I then contacted the reader to say that I scanned the entire catalogue, and if he wanted the catalogue, I'd send him a DVD with  all of the pages. All he had to do is send me his address. The reader had just started to collect mechanical toys, and was interested in further becoming more knowledgeable about old toys.

  The catalogue is a cornucopia of all kinds of toys and playthings that would have been around in the 1890's. Most, if not all of the toys are "hand-on" toys that would be played with indoors or outdoors.  THere are other interesting toys that I did not include in the 10 photos that I selected. There were model steam engines, fireworks, batteries, cameras,toy steam engine attachments, and fireworks. What's interesting is that there are no warnings in the catalogue to warn children and their parents to be careful when playing with these toys. Steam engines produce scalding steam heat, and fireworks, of course could be explosive and dangerous. Perhaps there were written instructions and cautionary notes included with the toys.

  What especially interesting to not  are the p[rices of these wholesale toys. The  mechanical locomotives below are sold by the dozen for the piece of $ 24.00 (U.S.) for 12\, while the Montauk toy guns are sold for $ 9.00 (U.S.) per gross (144 pieces).

    So that's it for this overcast and potential raining day of July 17, 2017. This spring and Summer have not been the best of seasons. We've has lots of cloudy and rainy days here in Montreal. I have a small piece of land that I rent out from my city, and I grow vegetables. I hardly have to visit it, because of the  amount of rain that has fallen. Of course, I shouldn't complain. On the west coast of Canada, in the province of British Columbia, the weather has been sunny and hot, and dry! As a consequence, there have been major forest fires, and evacuations of cities to protect the people. I hope the weather will improve for August and September, but we can only hope.

Thanks for dropping by,

And as always,

Have a great part of the day or night,

Wherever you may be.

Stacey Bindman

Toysearcher@gmail.com