BY JACK HERBERT JUST ABOUT EVERY SIXTH house on your block contains, somewhere within it, a toy train set. It may be relegated to the attic or on a high shelf in the guest bedroom, but toy trains, thank heaven, are never thrown out. Think about it. Our fascination with all trains spans every generation. We love to watch the [...]
BY JACK HERBERT EVERY ONCE IN A BLUE MOON a good reader of this magazine will send me a set of pictures and a fact sheet for a toy I never knew even existed. Who sez mail can’t occasionally be exciting? Here are two such toys that have come my way recently. They are both unique, both inordinately scarce, and [...]
BY JACK HERBERT PART OF THE APPEAL FOR MANY Americans planning a trip to London is the prospect of actually riding their splendid double decker busses, preferably on-high and up front. You’re above the traffic and the crowds. You’re god-like. The famous British slogan “Getting There Is Half The Fun” should add that their busses will provide the other half. [...]
BY JACK HERBERT OUR TOY REVIEW THIS month is based entirely on the incredible Toy Bus Collection of John Dockendorf, who has gathered together 4,000+ of them! His house in Pennsylvania is a virtual Museum. We have selected a few of his toys for you that hail from all over the world – the major countries in Europe, Asia, of [...]
BY JACK HERBERT England’s world-famous Rolls-Royce, and America’s magnificent Packard, both went into a categorical decline in the mid-Fifties. In the case of the Rolls, it’s still staggering along under German manufacture, but our acclaimed Packard ceased making beautiful cars in 1956. Toymakers, of course, appreciated the Packards of their day, but to build and sell a Packard toy cost [...]
BY JACK HERBERT THERE MAY INDEED come a time when your collecting fervor begins to abate a bit. An antique toy collection can only grow so large before you find you have to slow down or else add a room or two to the manse. It may be that by now you have your great toys displayed in every single [...]
BY JACK HERBERT DURING THE SPAN of years between 1969 and 1992, we antique toy collectors—if we were old enough—might have been just a tad less sober than usual. Why? Those were the years when many of our liquor distillers decided to add hard plastic toy figures to contain their booze in order to augment the sales of their usual [...]
BY JACK HERBERT SPRING IS HERE, finally, and so it is time to bring out the horses once again. Most of the toys we’ll be reviewing today date back to the turn of the 19th-20th Century, when the horse was IT in the field of transportation. Hop aboard, then, for a drawn ride down through the years. There’s not a [...]
BY JACK HERBERT THERE IS a spirit of romance that often manifests itself when dealing with horses. They are creatures like ourselves not machines, and, as such, display emotions, energy, and personality. That may be why we all seem to have a special regard for our early horse drawn toys, whether or not we collect them. There’s a touch of [...]
BY JACK HERBERT IT CAN’T HAVE been very easy to design and produce any toys that might amuse us enough we would want to actually buy them. The toys had to look rather unusual, represent some peculiar activity and, if possible, be relatively cheap. No Marklins in that lineup, indeed. So it is not surprising, is it, that very few [...]
