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.

C is for Cable Drums!

Tri-ang Railways, with actual insulating-wire cables.

 

My fascination with cable drums goes back to our train set, one of those magical events which only happen a few times in a lifetime, and which are as good as any previous daydream fantasies about them.

 

Triang-Hornby.

 

Mum was not treated well by Dad, not mentally, not physically, and not financially, in an era when the man owned everything, the wife was supposed to stay at home, the Police would shrug and mutter "domestic", and the husband's income was supposed to provide housekeeping. Consequently all our big toys tended to come from sacrifice, auction, or our father's occasional largesse.

 

Different designs.

 

Those odd Christmases when he would turn up from some foreign unaccompanied posting with two identical Lego sets, or two Action Man vehicles . . . one year it was two Chemistry sets, I got Lott's, my brother the larger Merit set, and we spent the next few years occasionally trying to gas or kill each other, ourselves, or just burn the house down with methylated spirits!

 

Colour variations.

So Mum would scrimp and save for the things she thought we needed, or wanted to get us, and we had hand-me-downs from other kids in the village. The Church fete was a standard for toys, and we never had a new bike, they would come from the auctions, get stripped-down and rebuilt, sometimes painted post-office red, and when Mum had a bit of spare cash a deal would be made of going to the cycle shop in Fleet and getting a pair of Ever Ready cycle 'lamps', or a little tool kit, which hung from the back of the saddle!

 

Merit Cable Laying Party.

 

And don't think this is a sob-story, I can't fault my childhood, it was privileged and vaguely middle-class, albeit, with Mum jumping through hoops in the background, which I wouldn't understand or appreciate, until much later. 

 

Merit Cable Drums (one open, one closed)

 

One year, when we were about 7/8, we came down to breakfast (after waking at about 2 a.m. and devouring our Christmas stockings), to find the summer table cloth over the dining table, where Christmas dinner would later be held, but it was clear the dinning table was A) rather lumpy, and B) seemed to have slightly larger dimensions than it had had the night before.

 

Wardie Matermodels.

The open one is made of resinated card. 

After breakfast we were directed to a large parcel which had appeared under the tree overnight, which was labelled to both of us, and instructed to attack the wrapping-paper from both ends simultaneously, which we did, to reveal a large, homemade wooden box, inside of which was a complete, second-hand model railway collection, with a couple of Locomotives, various items of rolling stock, and a small corrugated cardboard box of various Airfix, Tri-Ang and Merit accessories, passengers, cargo etc.

 

Airfix trackside kit.

There was an old die-cast level-crossing, some signals, platform sections (not enough for a complete station, but enough for imagination!), all sorts, a lead water tower, I can't remember it all now, and it would get added-to, over the years. But one of the wagons was the Triang-Hornby cable drum flat, with the two green drums, and, in little presents hidden on the tree over the next few days, was revealed the Merit Station Staff with barrow, and the Cable Party with the red cable drum.

 

Trix TT-gauge.

Image - Vectis Auctions, I think!

 

The load can be transferred to an OO flat car or bogie well-wagon!

Mum had bought a whole train set, from the - now long gone - Pearsons Auctions in Fleet, and under the table cloth, was a chip-board layout, painted with roads, a pond, fields etc . . . in household gloss paint, the pond was just a bright blue blob, but, it had a figure-8, inside a large oval, with sidings, and was the best thing we'd ever seen!

 

Kibri, real wire?

 

An old Hammant & Morgan transformer was wired-up and plugged in and after a certain amount of sanding the track, and oiling points, it worked! We played with it until mid-afternoon, and when the smell of dinner started to warm the house, so we had to put it away, slide the board down the hallway wall, and wait until Boxing day to have another go!

 

Roco International.

Obviously cable-laying, and the delivery of cables, became a regular feature of the railway, which ened-up fixed to the joists in the attic! And I've never got cable-drums out of my system. There's an Eldon cable truck or two, mentioned passim, and for Blogging another day, and various track-side drums from various sources, including the other Merit set, and over the years I've managed to get most version of Hornby, Tri-ang and Triang-Hornby flat cars with cable drums!

 

Wiking.

 

I guess it's also, that when we were kids, cable drums were literally everywhere. They filled lay-bys, pale pine, newly delivered ones, neatly stacked, rotting, collapsing piles of old gray carcases. they were all down the sides of the railways, men burned piles of empty one in fields, there were lorry-loads of them on every A-Road!

 

Bachmann.

 

As we transitioned from Edwardian, horse-drawn Britain, to the 'white heat' of post-war technology, everyone needed cables, the railways, British Telecom/the Post Office, the National Grid was being established, street lighting, illuminated traffic island bollards, traffic lights and road signs, and there were even rumours of traffic control cables under the new M4, and it was all in your face!

 

Preiser, modern steel drums.

 

It's all still there, but it gets replaced or updated in small sections, from reusable sheet steel, or steel tube drums on trailers, it gets pulled though from a side street, rather than trench-dug the length of the High Street, so you're not so aware of it happening these days, and wooden drums have almost disappeared! As have the little stripey tents the workmen hid in on their endless tea-brakes!

 

And I really will try to get the rest of the HO-OO figure posts done this Christmas! It was going through those posts which lead me to this post! There's a follow-up post on the military train stuff too.

 

Aaaaannnnnnd, a few days later: 'Here's a military train, please readers, send me your train stuff before Hugh does any more', and only four days after 69 people were killed on a Spanish train? Tasteless. You can hear his brain not working from the other side of the country!

 

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-trains-in-spain.html

R is for Recent Reading

Not from the last few weeks of enforced sabbatical, but earlier in the year, or even last year, but new purchases, rather than the stuff from the 2021-'23 sorting photo's folder, which we have been looking at in thematic lumps, and I can't remember where they all came from, but I suspect a couple of visits to the old bookshop in Alton, and a couple of charity shop purchases?

 

Ironic, as I'd forgotten it, and it has a whole page on the Gowland & Gowland vehicles, whose drivers we looked at a while ago! A useful little primer on 'Old Fashioned Cars', in both die-cast metal and plastic, along with sections on the larger collector models. The cover image includes some of the European plastics we saw a few French examples of, in some posts a year or two ago, here at Small Scale World.

 

This is a fascinating 'document', I can't work out if it is some kind of facsimile, or the actual Bassett-Lowke catalogue of 1968/9 (or for 1969), I suspect the later, but it's very modern-looking for a late-60's tome. It has all manor of sections, including hundreds of old adverts going back to their inception, what appears to be their - then - current range, other makers collectables, in the London shop (including a lovely boxed set of European toy soldiers), future plans, and various other bits of company history, and tech-spec' stuff.

 

I tend to only buy doll, doll's house or Teddy' books when I see them going for a song, as they are well outside my main areas of interest, but they often have useful annexes or appendices, and anything with an index can have a use, if only to look up company or individuals' specifics. And Christies are a better class of auctioneer - if you know what I mean!

 

This is a bit 'coffee table', but without the large format or colour imagery! It's a rambling meander through certain aspects of popular culture, with a bias toward design, and will complement several similar works already in the library. Again more use as a reach-for/dip-in reference work, than a definitive guide to anything!

 

Three more for the 'same size as Shire Albums'' section! There is a bunch of the Miller's somewhere, not seen when we looked at this format and the Shire's last year, because they we shot separately, while the Louis Wain is a catalogue of known collectors/vintage postcards. The other is a glossary of old auction terms, and panders more toward my interest in language and words, than toys, but there's some collectables stuff in there!

 

This seems to be in a similar size and format as the Manga guide, I bought (and posted) a few years ago now, so they can sit next to each other when they are finally set up (was there a superhero volume as well?), and provide a ready-reckoner for stuff I know so little/less about, although I know a bit more about this than Japanese cartoons, I prefer the Euro-stuff which begat Metal Hurlant, or the 2000AD inspired UK output, and often find I need help with the more populist US stuff, and modern 'Indy' publishing!

 

A trio of actual Shire Albums, there is an 'Other Collectables' post on walking sticks in the long queue, playing cards come under toys & games, and will add to several other works on the subject - there's even a book specifically on boomerangs in the library!

 

The tile work will enhance a separate library on the subject, other interests of mine include both the Art Nouveau/Arts & Crafts tiles, and mosaics; ancient and modern. Although I'm also interested in the bi, or tricoloured clay tiles of the medieval period (Church floors), their modern copies (Victorian/Edwardian hallways and lobby's), and the somewhat unscientific science of repeat patterns and mirror-symmetry which drives some forms of tiling/tile design (or wall papers/wrapping papers), which can quickly get you into Fibonacci, fractals and quantum weirdness!

 

This was a brilliant find, coming too late to crib on this Brian Berke contributed (nine years ago!) post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2017/01/c-is-for-contribution-week-i-circus.html

 

And it's clearly the tourist/visitor keepsake, for the exhibition which Brian visited. It contains a history of both its building, and how it ended up where it is, and has lots of images of the various elements while they were being built. Interestingly, there's no sign of the sea horse/merhorses, Brian shot, so they must be a newer addition, from the hands of the Mr. McGarvey and his wife, whom Brian mentioned at the time?

C is for Colección de Indios y Cow Boys Humorísticos

This is a weird one? Firstly, it was intended to be the fourth post in the sequence when we looked at the Lik Be / Gordy sets of Wild West kids and knock-off cake decorations, back in June (although I don't think these have any connection with LB, beyond the humerous and Wild West subject matter), and secondly, because I don't seem to have shown my trio on the blog, when they only came in recently, and were intended for this post, whenever I got round to posting it?

 

I've checked the recent show report posts, I've checked the donation stuff from Chris and Peter, and can't find them, so I suspect they may have been a private purchase, which got sorted into the collection, in the normal rhythm of things, and while I would have intended to shoot them, I must have sorted them into the 4x5½ bags I use, and sent them off to storage without shooting them?

 

Anyway, I found them last night, looking for something else, over at the storage site, and brought them back here, thinking maybe I'd posted it all, but 'just in case', and sure enough, no sign of them on the Blog, and the specific post, still in Picasa! So shots taken and we'll look at them and the Jecsan catalogue first, then a bunch of Internet scrapings found over the years.

 

Jecsan catalogue scan, the full set of figures goes to six foot and three mounted each for the two lots of protagonists, with one horse pose each; bareback for the Indians, and saddled for the Westerners. The card for the separate Tipi seems to be designed to make a lithographed 'paper flat' totem pole?

 

The toymen of Hong Kong took two of the foot Indians and one of the mounted cowboys for some revenue generation, probably at the request of a Western buyer, that's how it worked there, but gave the mounted cowboy the Indian horse - presumably because that's what the sample they were given, to pirate, contained?

 

A decent rear-shot

The hat of my cowboy is lacking the mark seen further down the page, he being marked on his back, instead, suggesting at least two lots/tranches of these, with either changes to the tool, or separate tools, a quandary not made easier by them all sticking to the same paint-scheme . . . multiple cavities maybe?

 

Paint, and markings have some similarities with Blue Box production of the era, think either set of Knights or the Jean-cloned Wild West, so these (or 'some' of these) may have come from one of the Tai Sang factories, but we'll probably never know?

 

Looking at these 'Comic Coyboy' cale decorations, from Carrousel, but not owning them, I can only suspect that A) they may be hard polystyrene, against the soft Polyethylene of all the others seen here, and B) might be smaller sub-piracies - a second/third lot/set.

 

The painting is simpler, and indeed, it appears one mounted cowboy/horse combo' is undecorated, but big may/mights here? They also look similar in general execution, to the HK copies of Ajax base-ballers, American footballers and other cake decorations in the same vein?

 

 

There seems to have been one of the many copies of the Britains Herald totem pole also associated with them, but paint differences and plastic colour might point to them just being 'chucked in' to online auction images?

 

A pair of Indians, presumably a similar card has the cowboy and horse in a different blister? The "Cowboy [singular] and Indians [plural] in that heliotrope/carmine-red 'ink stamp' effect font, is found on other Wild West rack toys, and may be another clue to producer, or more likely wholesale agent? But again we're unlikely to ever know!

 

Another pair.

 

The different mark of the possible second lot, I mentioned above. A separate tool or later change to the existing tool? Sadly the pictures in this auction lot (final five images), didn't include a decent rear-shot - as they hardly ever do!

 

The only paint variation with the commoner set, is this cowboy with a red shirt, suggesting a larger set, although a horse is absent, but it makes for a more balanced 2:2 fight in the icing around a chocolate-finger 'log' fort!

 

They aren't really compatible with the Lik Be sets, being more obviously caricature adults, than the cubby-cheeked kids of the LB set, but are cartoony enough to compliment a display of them, should someone want a display of infant-oriented cake decorations! And there's the Lucky Luke figures from Comansi and similar figures from Exin (which may have been sourced from Comansi too), to consider in this genre.

E is for Erudite Editions and Ephemera

Let's get the boring ones out of the way first, then we can get into the proper polymer plunder! There was a new book, a new facsimile catalogue, a - now - quite old book and some other ephemera in the PW show loot, and that's what we're looking at today!

Barney Brown had these two on his stall, and I dare say you can get them from him at;

 

https://www.heraldtoysandmodels.co.uk/

 

The Timpo facsimile is a new one I think, being a scanned reprint of an old Timpo plastic solids catalogue, from the time between the hollow-cast era and the full-on Swoppets, and while it's mostly black & white, there is an opening colour page, with the cowboys, Indians, FFL and Arabs fully illustrated. It also includes a copy of a letter signed by Ally Gee, head of Model Toys.

 

I haven't managed to read the Swoppet tome yet, it's a sister publication to the one on knights, which I passed-on a while ago, I just didn't believe there was that much to say on less than two-dozen figures! But, this has four sections, covering all the other Swoppet lines (although you could argue the Eyes Right were only the parade/ceremonial Swoppet lines!), with a less fastidious, shall we say, attention to the minutiae of each range, so it will be a better general read.

 

Not than I'm knocking the first volume, if it was for you, I know how obsessive some people are on Swoppet Knights! And hell, I can get bogged down in the small, precise, or trivial details of far more esoteric stuff, than this 'mainstream' interest material, but it wasn't for me.

 

Also, I think it's a similar format to the other works on Britains plastics by Barney and Peter Cole, published in association with Plastic Warrior, so will sit well with them, at the 'landscape' end of your bookshelf!

 

This is a fun one . . . I've been waiting thirteen years to get this, I knew I would; it was just a case of waiting for somebody to die, at the right time for his copy to end up at a show I was attending, when or where that might be, and while I don't know if that's the case, in this case, but anyway, here it is.

 

And the first thing I'll say, is, it's bloody heavy! I reckon it's about the same as eight bags of sugar, 8kg's or about sixteen pounds (I haven't actually weighed it), or a large bag of potatoes, but that's where the parallels with potatoes start and finish, this is a fantastic work, and I won't hear a word against it.

 

It covers in some detail, everything the non-Spanish collector might need to know on Spanish toy soldiers and model figures, and while I think I might have a Sobre brand or two, not in here, and seem to have more Credeco elephants, than are listed, that's just the eclectic nature of my own collecting, and there's a ton here, I knew nothing about, at all, including on both Credeco and Sobres!

 

But why the thirteen-year wait Hugh? Well, therein lies a pretty tale! Which goes back further than the 2013 publishing date of the volume before you. I originally saw it advertised on one of the Spanish or Portuguese Blogs, which pre-dated mine, and were among the first Blogs I linked to in my sidebar features here at Small Scale World, but upon expressing an interest in getting what was the earlier, self-published version, was warned-off, by one of the Spanish collectors (the thread's still there), due to, shall we say irregularities in the book's arrival and/or repayments?

 

So, when a while later, someone waxed lyrical over it, in a UK magazine, I thought it was right and proper to warn others of what was being reported, by the Spaniards, as I was still, technically, at the time, a 'consultant editor' to the publication here. And that was all I did, I repeated the warning, as clearly second-hand, and, from the Spanish.

 

Mr. Hermida managed - understandably (no one likes criticism) - to take a certain chagrin to that, and rather over-personalised his response, in a subsequent addition of the magazine in question, during which he seemed to admit that there had been problems, but that they were all sorted [however I've since been approached by a major German collector, who is still owed several hundred Euro's for his copies, which never arrived], and a slightly catty repost from me ended that particular long-distance, printed conversation.

 

In the months (or years?) following that exchange, it was announced that Andrea Press, the publishing arm of the very well-know Andrea Miniatures, would be taking over the project, for the second, enlarged edition, and that there would be an English language volume, which was good news for everyone!

 

Except there then followed a long series of publishing dates, new publishing dates, rumours of plan changes, and press releases, explaining last minute updates, hiccups, and so on, to the point where some thought it would never actually happen!

 

But, in time for Christmas 2013, if memory serves, it was finally published! I believe there are 300 in English and maybe a 1000 in Spanish? I don't know, but mine is numbered 'of 300', so I assume that's the English-language 'limited edition' total?

 

Obviously, given what had happened, I wasn't contemplating sending off to the author for a copy! But this was back when I wasn't active as a consumer on that there Wibbly Wobbly Way either, so ordering a copy from Andrea wasn't likely to happen, and while I did hint to family members who were online in that fashion, that it might make the best Christmas present ever, for anyone they might know, who collected toy soldiers, the hints fell on shallow ground, and that might have been the year I got three copies of 'Tailgunner's repetitive second/third/forth (?) effort! Well, it was piled-high and sold cheap in The Works!

 

Now I hold Mr. Hermida no ill-will over the correspondence through media, all those years ago, and have only raked it all up here, to A) explain why it's taken so long to get one, and to get it on to the blog, and B) as a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of writing/producing a 'grand opus' . . . it's not easy!

 

In fact it's bloody hard, especially if you are planning a large format, or lots of data/tables of information and/or many illustrations, or any combination of them, and even more so, if your target audience is probably no more than a couple of thousand dedicated collectors nation world-wide, in a small hobby, where not everyone can throw four ponies at the wall, in short-order!

 

I know what publishing the two Farming in Miniature books involved, or have a fair idea of some of it, and it was years of dedication by three authors who had regular meetings with each-other, in pairs or threesomes, getting up to monthly or more frequent, as publishing-day loomed, meetings with the publishers, travelling all over the country, thousands of eMails, emergency updates of images, re-writes of paragraphs, whole pages or entire entries! Discussions on fonts, typefaces, pagination (how you number the pages!), layout and cover-designs, it's an endless headache, which I've avoided by just throwing it up here willy-nilly in a voice which changes with my mood!*

 

And, ignoring the problems associated with its gestation, 'Made in Spain' is a superb work, and Mr. Hermida is, along with Andrea Press, to be congratulated for getting it to those of us who have been lucky enough to get a copy. If you haven't, and you're a younger member of the hobby, I'll be dead soon enough, and you can enjoy my copy!

 

I will do a proper book-review of it, once I've read it a couple more times, I've really only leafed through it a few times, since last weekend . . . OK, I've dipped into it every day, alright! But there's so much to take in!

 

* And they still had to put the third volume online, and that, after a publisher change between the first two volumes! You can see it here;

 

https://farminginminiature.co.uk/volume3.html

  

 

I also picked-up these, I wasn't sure on the PW-20, but if it's a duplicate, it will make a useful swap for some of the earlier ones I still need (I think I'm still two or three issues short of a full run), while the PFPC has Marx Miniature Masterpiece stuff in, which I still have a soft spot for. The German (Strenger, Berlin) retail store catalogue is a box-ticker of limited use, but adds to the whole, and likewise the John Sanders/Treforest Mouldings thing, which is heavily annotated by a past owner. I think I actually have the full catalogues, by nation, from the James Chase collection?

 

Interestingly, the Strenger catalogue refers to the tanks as 'tanks' (kletter tank 'clatter' and Feuernder tank 'firing' or sparking), so panzer seems to have come later, with Nazism - there's a small sample of Elastolin SA, so the catalogue would appear to be 1933/34 maybe? 

 

While this site;

 

https://www.etymonline.com/word/panzer

 

Seems to indicate that the use of panzer was a deliberate act, sometime in 1939, what did Guderian call them in his seminal work? Could it be something the Nazi's came up with (from armour or mail), because those pesky Jew-loving Churchillian's over the Channel invented 'tank'? It's the sort of thing Trump does, with his Gulf of Fuckwit, Museum of Grifter, Peace Prize of Bum-Chums and Arse of Mouth.

 

A few other bits of ephemera which made it into this year's plunder-pile, mostly old Britains leaflets, a Timpo tick-list of medieval movie-character models, and a Skybirds packers card, by the looks of it. All grist to the mill of research!!

 

So, now we're into the plunder proper, I must thank, in alphabetical order, by Christian name this year, because I've forgotten, or not got several surnames; Adrian Little, Brian Carrick, Colin Penn, Isaac, Matt Murphy, Martin Fahie, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul, Peter Evans and Trevor Rudkin.

R is for Recent Events

Had a mare of a day yesterday (Thursday), although it wasn't as bad as it could have been, and I managed to get back to Waterloo OK, despite the impending strike by tube workers, and some bus staff! The main event being the picking-up of a lovely lot of loot from Peter Evans.

 

I had a better Saturday last, attending the BMSS show in Reading, where among other things I picked up the above ephemera, all relatively useful, especially the colour facsimile of a Lineol catalogue. I may already have some of it, particularly the Corgi checklist/customer leaflet, but if so, it'll make a useful spare to swap for something!

 

The Hausser farm and zoo flyer is an original, and there's some German language stuff which seems to be either a dealers lists, or trade orders of some kind, and which may or may not have future use. The V&A monograph is a bit of fun for the library, and a picture of a diner from Route 66 heralds a parcel from Brian, which I'll hopefully post in the next few days, while Steve Vickers gave me both his cards!

 

Two Elastolin facsimiles got left out of the other shot, and I won two items on the raffle this year, the Land Rover kit has no figures (shock horror!), so I may just make them up 'as is', and photograph them against future Land Rover posts, in their neutral . . . gray - I just (a while ago) remembered I had to go to the bank, so shot off, forgetting I'd been doing this, then thought I'd go for a walk, it's a nice day, or it was, it's dark now! And actually wrote 'neutral' about ten hours ago!

 

As well as show plunder, which needs photographing, and the box from Mr Burke, which has been shot, I also picked up a big lot from Chris, which also needs photographing, but I have sorted it, and there are some interesting bits winging their way to these pages!

 

When I was on Faceplant, I'd thank Chris when a parcel arrived, with the Collected Paratroopers image, a few days or a week or so before they got posted here, but, as I'm not on Faceplant at the moment, here it is! The red one is actually a stand-alone figure from Processed Plastics, but he made the line-up neater, and was needed in the flyboy zone!

 

And while I'd happily draw a veil over yesterday's shenanigans, as I said, I did manage to get to Peter's and pick up a collected bunch of donations and car-booty, which is also in the queue to be photographed, along with some charity shop stuff I picked-up this afternoon, next to the bank!

 

Given that I haven't cleared any of the stuff I was intending to clear, back in January, because I've had a month off, like a lazy fuck, there's no shortage of stuff to post, and I fear the capsule-toy mini-season may join the HO railway outstanding's in the never-never section of the short queue! We'll see, what will be, will be!

 

The next event will be the London Toy Soldier Show, on the 9th of May, with a Sandown the next weekend (16th of May), so it's lucky PW has moved to June really!