CGB is for Cool Glassware Buddy!

Another box-ticker from the Gift Fair at the NEC, and we're looking at glass animals from CGB Giftware, who are clearly some kind of marketing outfit for a cooperative of smaller, artisan makers, with at least two brands visible, Jasmine and Fox Fern.

 

Some of these are so clever, you have to work very fast, with molten glass, to get the techniques to work, and while there's an element of once you've designed one, you can reproduce it quicker and quicker, the nature of artists is that they will constantly have new ideas, so they are always trying new things, I love the giraffe with the bent neck, these two kerthunkersaurs, and, the ducks must be incredibly hard to get 'right'?

T is for Two - Davies & Langs

Here are a couple of companies formed in the nineteen-forties, so both in their 80th decade, and perhaps set-up with the post-war grants or ex-service gratuities, which were available at the time, and led to several toy companies being formed in the same era? Both shot at the 2025 Gift Fair in Birmingham's NEC, back in February. 

 

I don't suppose Davies Products started (1947) with much poured resin, but that's one of the materials they are carrying now, Davies are an importer specialising in Christmas decorations, and work closely with The Garden Centre Association, where you will find piles of this stuff at the moment.

 

And we're looking at the perennial favourites, nutcrackers, in three styles and another of this year's clear trends - retro' pulp-rockets and/or/with deform NASA astronauts, that's about eight, or ten times they've been on the Blog since this time last year, and there's more in the queue!

 

While Richard Lang ('Langs', established in 1949) describe themselves as "Wholesale Gift & Home Decor Suppliers", so I don't know where these glass ornaments actually came from, but they are very well done, and would make good cake decorations, now the chalkware and plastic ones have all but disappeared? The shot's not brilliant, but unknown to me the camera's lens was probably already failing, by February?

P is for Plastic Glass!

Sort of a 'part three', but not really connected to the previous two, which dealt with the 1950/60's stuff, these are the more common stuff from the 1970/80's, and will be quite recognisable to most of you, and really no more than an overview of the other plastic 'vitrines' out there.

 

I sorted the Tags out last night, and 'Glassware' covers everything made of glass from marbles up, but not these, 'Vitrines' covers the real glass versions of these, and they will also have the Glassware tag, while 'Glass Animals' will cover both these plastic ones and the glass ones, so these will have the latter Tag only, marbles will get Glassware only, and real glass animals will have all three Tags, which will hopefully help someone in the future, get the right search-results up?

 

A nice set of six from Hans Postler over the Channel, they are better known, to us, from their many sets of rack-toy soldiers, more in keeping with the main thrust of the Blog, but that this is here, reminds us most of these guys were general 'Toy & Novelty' importers/wholesalers, and would turn their hands to anything they thought they could make a small profit on, and, these are probably 1980's, or later?

 

These have more the look of the '70's about them, and they have tree-hanger rings in them, so there you go, get a daft-looking mouse hung for the festive season! But, you know, if you can't afford the glass ones, because you have some shitty, underpaid job, and live on a trailer-park, and you see these going cheap in the local gas station, or drug store, why not, if only for the kids?

 

Kids aren't snobs, now, I am a bit of a snob, specifically on Christmas decorations, but I was raised to be so, by my late, and much missed mother, who had her own reasons for being like that; Nuns, an even stricter mother and an Edwardian upbringing!

 

'The sins of the Fathers . . .', 'The child is the father of the man'  and all that! There is always a truism in old sayings, wives tales and aphorisms. The tragedy is that somehow, 70-years of progressive democrats, totally failed to educate enough idiots, as to what they were trying to do, and we now have enough Morlocks and Yahoos, who don't get 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel', and they are giving justification to the Trumps, Farages and Le Penns of intolerance?

 

Just as we need the World to come together like never before, the warmongers, climate-deniers, the superstitious, and the anti-science brigades, rise, like muddy, Ork scum from Isengard, to wreak the planet with their ignorance, and singularly selfish stupidity.

 

A knock off Snoopy, an elephant who's also a key-ring, two more of the cocktail glass donkeys, we saw in brown, last time, and a variation on the Hans Postler elephant. The HP set is basically the six commonest types (from experience; that may not be strictly true!).

 

Another elephant, slightly better (slightly earlier?), another mouse, and the deer we saw in one of the comparison shots a few weeks ago. The elephant, if cleaned would have that faux uranium-glass look to him, but I don't know if it's a transparent marker (like most of them) or dyed plastic, and fear if I cleaned him, he might lose all his original colour!

 

A swan and yet another mouse!

 

Two of the mieces, back to back, but not yet in pieces!

 

Two of the elephants, with a small rhinoceros, he's probably from a Christmas cracker, but could equally be a gum-ball, capsule-machine prize, or something from a Lucky-bag, this stuff tended to get around!

 

The Rhino', it's missing one of those crappy plastic key-rings, you press both ends of, to hook onto the plastic oblong which he has retained. Is it meant to be a woolly-rhino'?

 

Only came in recently, and a charm-loop suggests gum-ball or Christmas crackers again?

 

These are interesting, Bam Bam and Pebbles, from the Flintstones, both larger sculpts to, they seem to have been taken from the sort of PVC stuff Bully and Comics Spain might have been issueing, he's holding a club behind his back!

 

While these are equally interesting for having been taken from a set of dogs, which we may have seen here in more realistic colours, as polyethylene toys, but here in the same clear 'canopy' 'styrene, enhanced with transparent coloured marker-pen! We'll look at proper glass ones next!

C is for Chained Miniatures!

More glass animals, except these are all plastic, but I explained how and why that Tag is going to work, and glass animals they are, because glass animals they're pretending to be! Looking at Horses this time!

Chained! Make no doubts about it, these critters are going nowhere, until they're glue!

 

While the deer were 'Mum' and two kids, here we get small medium and large of basically the same pose, still connected with the little anodised aluminium chain, and in a rich orange transparency, with yellow-painted higlights and the same big doe-eyes!

 

A darker orange-brown has also come-in to the stash, here compared with the cocktail-glass ornamental donkey, manufactured in a similar colour, in all cases here, a hard, brittle polystyrene.

 

That donkey in full - that's it, more box-ticking! 

G is for Glass Animals - Oh Dear, More Deer!

I was toying, for several years (the folder these come from has been filling since 2020) with trying to establish 'Vitrines' as the collective noun for these, but the trouble is vitrines are already a thing, specifically small glass table-top/mantle-piece display cabinets, sometimes confused with the similar terrarium glass mini-greenhouses for houseplants, or even fancy lanterns for tea-lights!

 

So even if you were minded to go along with me, it wouldn't be ideal, and sometimes confusing, while if you were determined to not cooperate with the naming exercise, it would annoy the hell out of you every time I used it!

 

Equally, some people call them 'Murano', especially on eBay, where EVERYONE's an expert! And, while there are elements of Murano in their production, Murano is a particular form of Venetian Glass, specifically from the island of Murano, and pertains to larger pieces, using techniques not often found in these little novelty animals, which are more generic to glass foundries everywhere, and amateur glass-sculpting hobbyists.

 

AND, we're looking for a word or phrase which will also cover the plastic-tat versions, and 'coloured-transparent-animals-in-glass-or-plastic' is too much of a mouthful, so, they will be 'Glass Animals' in the Tags, even if they are plastic, and I hope that suits everyone!

 

In the order in which they were originally shot, we'll start with the plastic tat! These were a common prize at fairgrounds, where skill in hooping, hooking, magnet-fishing, shooting (air-guns or darts) or knocking a coconut off a pole, could win you your very-own, chained together set of coloured, transparent animals!

 

Chained together, coloured, transparent . . . yeah, well, boys would pick a pack of cap-bombs or something!  A loo-roll 'Furby' (called a Gonk, and predating Furbies by several decades!), or a bottle of bubble-liquid with wand, were other common choices, a Frisbee, or a balsa-wood fighter-plane! But, under multicoloured, flashing lighting, on their little gloss-painted wooden plinths, these boxes looked pretty attractive!

 

One the left, 1950/60's, on the right 1970's, even more-tattier, tat, in a reverse pose, but the charm's still there, and I bet you can still find these in some souks or markets about the planet! In the end, key-rings were added to some of the more substantial, or just 'less-frangible' mouldings.

 

But, in the 1940/50's, you got glass ones! And here, on the left is a box for a glass set, with a slight variation of the other set on the right - lightly oblong box against the first one's true-square, and a variation of code number, 33V as opposed to 33VA?

 

AG or GA does not spell Venice or Murano! German, Czech', American . . . Japanese?

"ArtNo" hints at Germany, does anyone know?

AG could be something-Glass.

 

The glass ones are much finer, and quite delicate, although some strength is imparted by dint of the stretching, and the annealing effects of continued heating and cooling, as the various steps of the manufacturing-process are gone through.

 

Glass got tissue-paper packing, while plastic gets plastic!

 

Comparison between the two, let's be fair to the toy-men of Hong Kong, it's not bad, and in a capitalist world, it's all about the money saved, at least they've tried to make the one resemble the other? No pink bows, or chains, on this (later?) set of plastics?

 

"Come out to play!"

 

Another boxing of the plastics, the little pink bows are illustrated, but the bondage chains are left off all artworks, here credited to an Illfelder Toy Co., of New York, but plainly the same Hong Kong product.

 

A lot I saw on eBay, with pink-glass horses (or donkeys?), the ceramic deer we saw, cropped-out in a previous post a day or two ago (I'm losing track at the moment!), and a chained set of the 'barley-sugar' deer, also in glass.

 

This one, who I picked-up the other day, in a charity shop next to the lucrative (for Rack Toy Month) Post Office in Cranleigh, is slightly more Murano in style with the orange glass-powder sprinkled, or, more commonly 'picked-up' by rolling the molten glass over the ground glass, on it's back, but is, otherwise, following the same pattern as the others, and it's one of the simpler techniques.

 

While these - above - are obviously all mass-produced sets of commercial production, the many glass animals you find, may also include both craft/hobbyist pieces, and end-of-term/end-of-year student test pieces - can you produce, using a set number of techniques, a number of similar sculpts, following a set of recently-taught rules?

V is for Vitrious

You may have noticed I'm trying to alternate Toy fair and Gift Fair posts, between London Loot's, it won't last for long, but in the meantime here's the next post from Birmingham's Spring Fair; Parmy Ltd., a maker of glass ornamentals, including these exquisite little figurals.

 

Smaller.

 

Bigger.

 

Close-up!

 

Made from hot rods of coloured glass, it's like working with scalding cheese or something, but the finished articles are very clever. There were several similar companies at the show and I shot various other lots, so we'll be returning to the new 'Vitrines' tag!

Website

https://www.parmy.co.uk/

V is for Vitriform Venusian Villains

Well, they don't look very friendly, they're as likely to be from Venus as anywhere else, given they are FICTIONAL, and they are definitely glasslike, as they are made out of glass! I shot these oddities on Adrian's Mercator Trading table back at one of the London Shows in the year just gone - torch-welded rod-glass alien figuriens

They look like the kind of thing you get in the sort of gift shop which isn't tied to a major tourist attraction, or a posh/independent Hotel's gift shop - "Something to take home for the relatives"? Clearly in a Murano style, but not well-executed enough to be such a renowned mark, and these were unmarked, in generic plain stock-boxes, but still - rather fun!

I think the two on the left are variations of the same purple/mauve chap/ess, while red and blue are to the same design, but obviously different colourways (red is quite opaque) and the green amphibiman one is altogether different, maybe from Mars! They could - of course - be qualification/end of term pieces from a glass student? The bases are also glass, opaque, white glass, like and Old Spice bottle!

LB is for Lik Be!

Because it's a B! More on that in a mo', first a quick reminder of the carded robot set I picked-up a while ago and showed briefly the other day;

 

The robot shape-specific blister means another set with the other three is a probable certainty, although that is itself an oxymoron, but you know what I mean! Wotan over at Moonbase has specialised in the chunky-monkey one, and I'm pretty sure he has one of these faux-vitreous ones, so the other three are out there!

 

But that logo . . . the clearest or 'best' yet; it's a B, isn't it? A 'B' for the Be of Lik Be, not Lik Pe, not Lick Pea, and definitely not Lick Pee!

 

I realised looking at this, that the two uprights are - roughly - centred, so the whole monogram is actually placed to the right, with room to the left (as we look at it) for the 'sun' rays in white, coming out from the centre to be visible, under the monsters arm. On the right you have the dark rays going in, but no white rays coming-out, because there's the bottom curve of a bloody-great B in the way!

 

It's a pain, it's always been a too-busy, shit-rendered, poor logo design, but get used to it, it's LB for Lik Be, and you read it here first, twice, several years apart; 'cos I'm calling it again!

 

The Robots; Police Motorcycle, well, that's how I've always thought of him, or 'Motorcycle Cop' but he could just as easily be ray-gunning, pressure-washing the streets or painting hoardings! In the style of the fake glass-animals which also came out of Hong Kong, he's moulded in clear 'styrene and overpainted in transparent yellow and jade.

 

I used to call this one Marcel Marceau, but now I call it Vichy (cheese eating surrender monkey) in homage to Mathias and his mob! Minimal decoration on an already weak sculpt, sums this one up!

 

Stern Gang! He's always wearing a clear, definite, permanent frown, and one feels he should be the sidekick for the 'Darth' sculpt in the Airfix Space Warriors set?

 

I also picked-up a loose set of the ones I've already got in a bagged-set (seen here at Small Scale World passim), so they can stay there! The other three I call Lobster (obviously!) Rocket Robin and I can't remember what I used to call the fat one, but nowadays, it's just Wotan!

 

I've had two lots of the small scale versions come-in recently as well, all marked originals; gunmetal polyethylene above, and chromed hard plastic below (with a few knock-off spacemen), both samples having no Lobster!

 

A poor factory-paint version and another sucker copy have also been added to the pile, and I nicked the mustard-yellow image from eBay a while back I think, cropped-out of a larger image, The soft plastic large-scale are pierced for key-rings/fobs/chains, so must be later production.

 

The small scale Bike Cop has quite different arm sculpts from the larger one, who has 'cup and ball' hands and elongated upper-arm segments, against the smaller one's flatter-cup (potato masher!) and pointer (Biro!), with double ball-joint arms.