About Me

My photo
No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Thursday, April 20, 2023

S is for Show Report - Sort of!

I don't really do show photo-reports anymore, I've a few left in the queue, going back to 2013 or something, but really a bunch of shots of trays of stuff you saw if you were there and can't do anything about if you weren't? And who wants to be reminded of things they might have missed? I know some people do gush over such stuff, but if you follow their comments, they gush about everything!

However, I do still shoot stuff which is interesting or unusual, or way beyond my budget! And here are a few bits I shot on Mercator Tradeing's stall at last- September 2021's Sandown Park toy fair, but had to leave where they sat.

Airfix 'Rocket Car' racer; there's a spring missing, with which you compress the 'engine' with the wire appliance, like an old starter-handle! And off it goes! I assume it would have been available in various colours/colourways?

Toydell; one of the less common early British composition brands, and clearly aiming at the tourist market, so most survivors will be found abroad (?). They were about 4-inches, so quite big boys, for display rather than play, but as they are closer to chalkware than a more-robust compo', you wouldn't want to play with them, or be able to for long, before they fell apart!
 
These were rather lovely survivors of a bygone age, they are trays of Penny Toys of the sort a street-trader would have carried on the street with him, dispensing one figure for one penny! Interesting to see that a few of them have a basic paint-job rather than the all-over gold or silver commonly associated with the type. And I think Adrian said they were actually Britains' own cheapies? If that's wrong; it's my bad!

These could be that milk-powder based polymer, 'casin', or they could be an 'ivorene' cellulose/celluloid type material, and while I suspect Portuguese in origin, they could be from southern France or Spain, or somewhere else entirely? Rather nice and clearly re-based in the past, they might have been removed from a vanity-unit mirror, clock or other piece of fancy furniture?

In a similar vein, comes this vignette of William Tell and his son, obviously missing a separate crossbow, and all the comments on the material of the rural couple, apply equally here. I'm not sure if it's meant to be a letter-opener or a bookmark, but favour the former myself, the bladed-base being a more solid chunk of phenolic or urea-formaldehyde type plastic

While from the 'It's Not Rare It's Mass-produced Plastic' department comes this shop-stock box of F.G. Taylor & Sons farmers, in mint condition. I think I have the figure in a dark-brown as well, but I might be confusing it with another model in the range. We will see them all when I get round to the A-Z page entry!

No comments: