About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 62-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.

Monday, October 26, 2026

E is for Elastolin Ephemera

Another one from the library, and, if you're an Elastolin fan, probably the one to get for the plastics, although there is a bit, on the end of the composition era, in there, if I recall correctly. Due to it's size, it doesn't go with the other catalogues in the box-files, but rather on the bookshelf, with the other landscape format stuff.
 
The shop proprietors' trade catalogue, and the beauty of this one, was that it came with about eight of the annual update packs, sent out by Hausser to all the properly registered stockists, which I carefully opened and inserted into the folder. With the few duplicates that careful insertion resulted in, I think there are about 300 pages in total.
 
Because I'm a collector, not a retailer, where a line or range was deleted (a sheet of instructions came with each pack, telling you which pages to remove, which to replace and which to add, where), or part of a range dropped, I left those pages in, as I did those pages where the new pages where substantially different, or had new artwork.
 
I also kept all the instruction sheets, and put them at the front of the leaver-arched tome, with/after the original 'how to use this catalogue' guide, in the order they were issued. And I kept the pages that were removed, but they are semi-lost, and occasionally I find them in an A4 Really Useful Box, while looking for something else, and I mean to place them at the back of this folder. 
 
Wild West 'swoppet' (steckfiguren - peg figures or plug-in figures) shop stock boxes.
 
Nativity set in faux carved-wood effect, and factory paint.
Notice how they've reversed the trio in each shot!
Except the Little Baby Jesus! 
 
Giraffes and big cats.
 
Mentioned in the previous post, the Hausser take on two of the Rojas e Malaret board games. They used the Elastolin 40mm figures, I believe with 'simple' paint, rather than the retail decoration? there's a whole section on Hausser's toys.
 
Wooden Wild West buildings and whole streets.
There are also wooden farms and zoos. 
 
Old Shatterhand or the 'Karl May' set, from a popular German TV series, after the books by May, Old Shatterand is best known as the blood brother of the Apache chief Winnetou in the series of Western  novels.

The pages are colour-coded to help the shop staff look things up quickly, and the format is pretty unique, being not an 'A' size, and having the rings a non-standard distance apart, but back then such things were more common, with industrial works, mechanical textbooks & operators guides, and various military publications and vehicle manuals being so published.

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