You Would Think!

Thursday, November 22, 2012
              Bright & Sunny / 46 F (8 C)

You Would Think!

or

How Hard Can it Be to Match up 

Current Day Auctioned Toys to a 1928 catalogue? 

   I had an idea yesterday, and decided to see what I could come up with.  How many auctioned toys could I find in the 2000-2012 timespan that could match a 1928 Butler Brothers catalogue? I figured that it would be to take 1 page of Structo Toys from the catalogue and search for them in current and past auctions from 1 auctioneer- Dan Morphy Auctions. To be fair though, Structo are not the most sought after toys, so they may not necessarily appear. Well, I only found 5.

   I did search out other auction houses from which I might use their photos, and still, I could not fill the whole page! There were some toys that I just couldn't find, or many of the toys that I did find were already sold by Dan Morphy Auctions!

  So for today, this is my post. 

I'd like to again thank Richard Mueller and Oldwoodtoys.com for letting me use their Butler Brothers Catalogue Scanned Photo

      The Structo toy company started up in 1908 by the Strohacker Brothers - Louis and Edward, and their partner C.C. Thompson.  At the start, the company made erector sets similr to those made by Mecano (Great Britain) and Gilbert (U.S.A.). By 1919, they decided to make toy cars, trucks, and construction toys. In 1935, the partners sold a majority of the company to Mr. J.C. Cokey, who continued to own the business until he died (1975). The Ertl Company (makers of lots of toy tractors) bought the toy patents and designs.*

*(paraphrased from O'Brien's Collecting Toys (A Collector's Identification and Value Guide)

Editied by Karen O'Brien, q12th Edition, Kraus Publications, 2008

Thanks for dropping by, 

and have a great part of the day or evening, 

wherever you may be.

Stacey

Old Toy Catalogues

Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Stormy and Raining

Old Toy Catalogues

    There is so much information on the Net, that it would take me 100 years to find all the material that I would like to read about and discover. Unfortunately, commercialism (making money) has become a big part of the Net. As a consequence, I lose lots of time begin redirected by Google to E-Bay, when I'm searching for old toys. I did find a new search engine named  Blekko, which is less commercial. As a consequence, I am able to find more web sites without visiting e-Bay as much on my way, to where I wanted to go in the first place.

   A few weeks ago, I discovered a wonderful site called oldworldtoys. 

  It's web address is  http://www.oldwoodtoys.com. It's a wonderful site written by Mr.Jim L. Sneed  with the help of his wife Judy. I've visited his fine site, but in the past, I was interested only in vehicles (trucks, cars, planes), so I never stayed long - big mistake! 

  A few days ago, I decided to do a search, and Jim's site came up. I spend more time, and lo and behold, I came across fabulous old catalogues that Mr.  Richard Mueller had added to Jim's site. The work that Richard put in to scan all the material on Jim's site is a treasure trove, that I will be making available in future instalments,and periodically to add to a post. 

   I hope that Richard won't mind that I removed the aged amber colour on those old catalogues. I don't think they had acid-free and archival paper back then!

  .The photos are improved from resizing and adding more pixels,but writing suffers  since there are not many pixels that make up the letters. So when resizing a printed page (type and photo), the type (writing) always suffer.

     The pages that I've presented today are from wholesale catalogues meant for viewing by stores all over the USA, and I guess a bit of Canada. Consequently the prices appear low, but they're wholesale. Nevertheless, even with a markup, prices are low relative to today.However, salaries of  average wage earners were very low as well. I know my father in the 1930's had to go to work without finishing high school. At the time, he was 12 years old, and he and his 2 older sisters had go out to work to support the family.

   I know that he made very little in those days, but so did many people. So what I've always wondered, was who were the people who could afford to buy their children such nice toys (and costly too) in those times in the 1920's-1930's? I would assume that Christmas was really special back then, and gifts for boys and girls would be given at that time.

   I'm writing this post a day ahead. The weather is going to be terrible for the next several days, so if there's no electricity up here in Montreal, the post will have already be ready. Mind you, our provincially-owned electrical utility Hydro-Quebec is one of the finest in the world. It supplies a fair portion of electricity to the Northeastern USA. I'm not that worried compared with my readers in the lower US states.

Thanks for dropping by,

and have a good day, wherever you may be.

And for those of you in the USA, please take care and be careful.

Stacey