U is for Usborne Publishing

Who took to threatening fellow-Bloggers back at the beginning of this Blog, some 15-odd years ago, god knows what they will make of a completed work, but at least two people received take-down/cease-and-desist eMails, way back when, just for publicising their (Usborne's) products!?

Scan of an old photograph of an old made-up, card model I did around 2003/4, and which was taken by a friend's kid to his junior school to be put on a bookshelf or something until it had accrued a thick-enough cover of dust to justify a trip in a skip during the summer holidays!

I hid the join in the two base-boards with coloured pencil on the moat and some scatter material in the courtyard, and I built it as per the instructions, down to the cocktail-stick flag-poles. I still have the knights in a little tub somewhere, in fact we may have seen them here at some point? The wall above the portcullis gateway had no fixing flaps or tabs, so had a tendency to lean forwards!

And it struck me, while building it, that it would be very easy to make a much bigger castle, from several, identical, Make This Castle / Make This Model Castle sets, building a much longer perimeter wall with all sorts of towers, and leaving the keep in the middle rather than in one corner!

S is for Standard

Some of my favourite toy soldiers are the card flats I've picked up over the years, and these are some of the nicer ones. Standard Games and Publications first advertised these in the late 1970's/early '80's. There were three ranges; ACW, Norman invasion of Britain and Fantasy.

This is the whole range of ACW and one of the fantasy sheets, the other being F1 Dungeon Adventure. Also missing are the sheets of Normans and Saxons.

[If anyone has the missing sheets to spare in good condition I have most of the ACW as mint spares for a strait one-for-one swap]

Close-up of the Confederate cavalry sheet, note how the same poses are used for Union and Confederate with a change of paint and also for foot and dismounted cavalry figures with the foot officer reused for the Artillery Officer, in other words, the original artist only had to come up with a small range of poses, yet the finished article still works...

...as can be seen here, there are at least one of everything on the baseboards illustrated. Each sheet came with a base sheet which vaguely matches the bases of the figures.

Comparison between various other modern card flats, left to right; Horse rider from cut-out race game in Christmas edition of Country Life magazine a few years ago; Usborne Publishing medieval peasant from the cut-out and assemble castle; Standard Union standing firer; Steve Jackson Games Half-Orc, this series of cards was recently re-issued as a single spiral-bound book, so if you're taken with them - check Amazon; Finally one of the rarest figures in my whole collection, this is a cut-out and stick figure - in 28mm - of the 54mm Atlantic space series, taken from the collectors cards that were issued with late production Atlantic 54mm WWII figures. I stuck him to a sheet of heavier card before cutting him tight to the artwork, hence the wierd base!