S&S is for Happy Easter!

It's getting so it wouldn't be Easter without the seasonal eMail from Brian with a photo-report on Scully & Scully's latest Window Display from New York, and while their consistency is not so great at Halloween or Christmas, they always seem to pull the stops out fully at Easter. Further blurb can be found in previous posts, so with meany thanks to Mr. Berke; enjoy!

There is a surfeit of strange ironies in this one, a lead hare, making chocolate rabbits from tin moulds!

I'd add that Brian's photography, through plate-glass, with back-lit reflections, has advanced greatly since the first of these a few years ago, and as always, half the joy for me is seeing them in Picasa, all embiggened!

 

And apologies for calling Brian 'brain' a couple of times recently, it is just a typo, but spell checker never picks it up, and it sometimes takes a day or two for me to realise . . . mea culpa! 

 

The other thing which is worth pointing out, is that each year, it's a completely new set of sculpts, given they are the larger 'vignette' type, and all get a very tight, professional paint-job, it's clearly a labour of love, involving various parties, on two continents, every year, from start to finish? Happy Easter all.

B is for Bookplates - 2 - Great Aunt 'Nina'

Helena Invicta Hall, was always known as Great Aunt Nina, and I used to think she must have been Mum's Aunt, one of the siblings of my Grandfather? But in preparing this, from the ages of those involved, it's become obvious she must have been Grandad's Aunt, despite outliving him, so Mum's Great Aunt, and therefore My Great Aunt once-removed . . . I think!

 

She is best known publicly for her recent, posthumous memoirs; A Woman in the Shadow of the Second World War, which I have only recently discovered, which is sad, as my mother must have been the person who left the diary with the local record's office, as she handled Nina's estate as nominated executor, but I don't think she ever knew of the book's existence? It was Nina's money which bought us our Austin A35 van, with which Mum furnished the house.

 

She is better known to me, not as a diarist, but as one of the inter-war art mob, who were a mix of tail-end/surviving Arts & Crafts movement advocates, and full-on modernists (Gill Sans typeface) with a hint of Art Deco, which included Eric Gill (who we don't talk about any more, weird sinner), and his brother Gordon, the printer/publisher. Uncle 'Jock' (one of Grandad's brothers) was a keen amateur or naive artist in Suffolk around the same time.

 

I have a lot of her work which I will Blog one day; sketches, templates and proofs for Pub signs, Church and village fête posters & flyers, local authority announcements, shop-window things (opening times, open/closed signs, that kind of thing) she was a busy, jobbing commercial artist and signwriter.

In which skill, she designed two bookplates for herself, one earlier in life, and a later one, both of which we're looking at here. Above is what I believe is the first, printed by Gordon Gill's London works and dated 1900, she would have been about 27 then, but it may be a second printing of a student-days design? To the right is a roughly contemporary picture of her, I think it's dated '97 on the back, and that's the 18's for younger readers!

This, as far as I know was the one she was using up to her death in 1967, I was only three and barely remember the shenanigans of Mum whizzing back and forth to Sussex, but there are vague recollections.

 

A much more austere or simpler design, with nothing more than hand calligraphy, I actually found a box or two still in Mum's papers, but I don't know when it dates from! Reading Gill's history, you can see how Nina, too, was subscribing to the anti-technology/mass production of consumerism with this paired-down, minimalist style.

E is for Eggie Business!

A few more capsule eggs, nothing terribly exciting, I wasn't really thinking about Easter this year, so neither looked out for nor searched-out anything seasonal . . . Actually that's a small lie, I did pop-in to Hobbycraft, just to see if they had anything this year; they had the dinosaur 'decoration' set last year with the small eggs, but they had nothing this year, it's always hit-and-miss with the discounters.

I Can't remember where I picked this up? I think it may have been the local hardware store, but branded to World of Sweets, unusual for having a lengthways split to the capsule (less of a choking hazard?), and the fact that the relief-flat dinosaur is over-moulded rubber - the back's plain black.

 

Found these on Amazon, still there; it was only the other day, with various whacky brand-marks! Twelve dino's in twelve eggs, best egg-hunt material, but no chocolate, which will disappoint some! We may have seen some of these loose, in one of various visits to these smaller-size dinosaurs, which as I mentioned the other day I intend to ID eventually, all on one page.

 

An eBay lot, just as filler for a thin post! From the seller's description, I gather these are from PMS International, who we have seen several times here at Small Scale World now, and were/are called Putty Surprize! / Mystery Pets Surprise.  They seem to have been issued as blind bag type things, with what looks to be - from the left; a hippo, owl, salamanda (?) and Koala bear. I suspect they glow in the dark too!

B is for Bookplates - 1 - Overview

I did mention a while ago that going forwards I'd be posting more 'nostalgia', and I probably meant fewer toys and/or more 'other things'! The term 'small scale world' covers a multitude of aspects (especially if you google it!), or sins, from microscopy to maps, and as it's my 'little' corner of the on-line universe, it should better represent me right or wrong, and as a title, covers doing so!

 

One of my abiding interests since I was first taken to the long-gone Thomas Thorpes book shop in Guildford (for many years the best second-hand bookseller away from Hay-on-Wye or London), and saw a small display of them at the top of the stairs, is bookplates, and as I earned a certain degree of opprobrium posting stone-eggs here, over an Easter past, I thought I'd try to annoy everyone with bookplates this Easter!

 

The simplest form of bookplate is this one, which may be a home-made or home designed one, or a commercially bought one, like those which I saw that day back in the 1970's. It was customary for people to design their own and then get a local printer to run them off, round here it's always been Chartalith at the other end of town! Ex Libris, for those who don't know, is Latin for 'From the Library of . . . '

These are all commercial bookplates, bought in packets of 20, 50, sometimes only 12 or 15, more as a novelty these days, and again, like those I saw in Thorpes, you buy a few packets, only to find the design long-gone from the catalogue when you need some more!

 

Coloured ones were a rarity, not so much now, where - in the right gift shop/garden centre mega-store - you can find quite garish full-colour ones among the more traditional designs. Here the green one has the motif of an owl, long associated with wisdom and bookishness. 

 

The small one at the top is both pretty, and pretty innocuous, while I rather like the art-deco chap, smoking in a club armchair and clearly hiding from the viewer - reading is a solitary activity!

Of course the great and the good leave more clues than a 'John' or a 'John Smith' and I've managed to track one of these chaps down, the one on the left seems to be this Penn, and I was able to provide Graces Guide with a copy of his Arms, remember; we only live as long as people remember us.

 

Excerpt of my eMail to Graces; "...There is a handwritten date, in pencil, on the blank flyleaf '1880', while a similar plate in a US library is reported to have come from his wife or daughter, from the time they were in Norfolk, further digging reveals they must have been tenants as Tavenham Hall was divided-up into flats which were rented-out by the owner until 1921 when it became a private school!

But it was your page which confirmed all the snippets I'd got from that there interwebamathingy, so I feel you should have a copy! I actually use your site quite a bit in my Toy Industry research.

Sadly, there seems to be no connection with the British Admiral, nor the Pennsylvania Penn's? The arms seem quite busy, with the right-hand side being maybe related to engineering? The rings? I don't know..."

 

Non Sine Laboure = 'Not Without Labour'. While the chap on the right drew a blank I'm afraid - Non Sufficet Orbis = The World is not Enough' . . . stolen by a recent Bond movie!

I love these two for their Arts & Craft look, the Figgis's could be any one of several likely pairings on Google, they seem to be quite a common surname and various Samuel and Anne Figgises have married or born several other Samuel or Anne Figgises!

 

The one on the right is not actually a bookplate per se, but rather a printers/publishers piece of marketing/advertising ephemera, George Allen being quite a well-known publisher, now Allen & Unwin, he originally worked with John Ruskin, the great supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as Ruskin's assistant, this 'plate' is mid-century I think, that's the 19's for you younger readers!

This could be the naval artist William J. Popham, and the plate might have been designed by Eric or Gordon Gill, or my Great Aunt once removed Helena Hall, who worked with the aforementioned (more on her in a subsequent post), but I have no empirical evidence for any of it, or even who this Popham is?

 

What is also of interest is that the rendition of the Edelweiss flower is almost the same as the design of the German Army's Alpine Jager cap-badge, itself relatively unchanged from the WWII version, they're having been implicated in few Nazi atrocities, got to keep it/their esprit de corps, during the de-Nazification of the rest of the Armed Forces, after the war?

This is in an 1832 edition of Robinson Crusoe, and it was funny trying to track it down on Google, because, as the original work was first published on 25 April 1719, it was by the 1830's, well out of copyright (Pooh Bear came out of copyright only the other day), and there are many reprints from the time, many illustrated, in single or twin volumes, this one is one of the more valuable versions, but not one of the mega-money ones! I'll cover it - the book - another day.

 

We can see young Mathieson won his copy as a prize for a combined History-Geograpgy-Gramar class, and the teacher, George Gartley, probably had the presentation plates printed at his own expense? Indeed, he may have paid for the prizes out of his own pocket, but you hope the head-teacher or governors helped?

Google gave some clues as to the nature of the rather Orwellian numbered school facilities of the time, but I couldn't find anything on Number 9 specifically

A close-up of the actual bookplate; Mathieson went on to better things and I've found this page, curated by the Charles Rennie Mackintosh project, which is almost certainly him;

 

https://www.mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/name/?nid=MathTA

It doesn't say whether he ever worked with the great master, but one suspects his workshops did work for some of Mackintosh's building projects, and it's also interesting to find that A) he stuck around Glasgow giving back to his community and B) founded a lasting, legacy prize, after winning one as a child.

The motto Fac et Spera translating to 'Do & Hope' is meant to be understood that prosperity comes from working, and keeping hope and faith in God.

So we've seen one or two non-Bookplate items already, but here's a few more. The one top right was awarded to my Father, who must have been arse-licking as he was as atheist as me, all his life, but I have a vague memory of him telling me he liked going to Sunday School, because it ran at the same time as church, but in the village hall (so you got out of 'Church'), and he had a crush on the Sunday School teacher!

 

To the left is a presentation plate, but no one has filled in the details, and I didn't note it when scanning the plate (everything in this post is in my [now] library), but I think it was something new-looking, so there was probably a bulk/multiple presentation, which somebody forgot to get somebody-else to sign?

 

From Wikipedia: Nihil sine Deo, Latin for 'Nothing without God', is used as a motto of the German Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen royal family and was the motto of both the former Principality of Romania and the former Kingdom of Romania, so a pre-war/wartime book/event?

 

While the jade green one is from another household-name publisher, and was pasted into a printed copy of the lecture referred to, so presumably they were presented to those who attended the lecture? And note, more colour among the 'presentation plates'.

This is an oddity, it seems to be a memorial bookmark (we will look at bookmarks another Easter,; there's hundreds of them, old, modern, memorial and advertising/commercial, but they are distributed to the four winds at the moment), which caused/causes you to remember the deceased everytime you pick up the book? And I say 'causes' because he was also findable, here;

 

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/196064502/henry-peter-swan

 

And I'll try to get this card uploaded to that page, so like the Penn arms, it has a chance of surviving me. It looks as if it's a distant relative of Dr. Swan who has set up the page? Per Stellam Omnia is a rather fatalistic-sounding 'all by the stars', which I'm taking to mean everything is in the hand of the fates, rather than a lot of night-work without candles?

Finally, this is neither a bookplate nor a presentation plate, but rather a decorative frontispiece to a book I haven't dared look-up the value of, having consigned it - temporarily - to a shipping-container with all the extremes of temperature that entails.

 

It is from a 17-somthing, two-volume edition of Marlow's Faustus as the play-script, re-bound (in the 18-somethings?) in a single leather-volume with all the fancy tooling, now quite aged, but still in one piece. The panel has clearly been designed, however, to be signed in the celestial sun-ray/cloud-break by the owner.

 

Hand signing being as common as dedicated bookplates; we all know there is a certain charm, or frisson of nostalgia associated with finding an old annual with a biro-scrawled "To Jim from Nana Mabel and Uncle Bob", or even finding, in smudged pencil, in an old Ladybird book, or Observers guide, "This book belongs to Jane"!

B is for Bioki

Typical . . . this should have posted yesterday sometime, but having congratulated myself for sorting out the nightmare folder, I attempted to close the not-a-user 'user' folder, by combining it with the actual user-folder and found that I'd lost all my settings and had to re-do everything, all my bookmarks, all my Firefox add-ons, all my saved log-in's and passwords, sometimes you do wonder just exactly what you did in a previous life?!!

Anyway, just a quicky from Brian Berke, on a new branding of capsule egg he found Stateside recently . . . Bioki (which I've been mispronouncing 'boy-key' in my head prior to actually typing it!); they're quite large eggs with printed faces and hand-clamps to lock them closed.

Sadly nothing too figural, with a packet of candies, an interactive toy (press the button/lever and the deign showing on the inner-ball changes view), a novelty ring and a sticker animal, Brian was going to open the other with his grandson, so there may be something more interesting to report from its contents? Another box-ticked, many thanks to Brian!

S is for Squirrelling Around

Spring struck suddenly a couple of days ago, and I got out and mowed! Only took the tops off to help the lawn dry out, and I'm hoping to get a lower cut done today or tomorrow, but it got the old blood pumping and I managed to sort out all the missing image folders and import them into Picasa, that evening!

 

It took hours, in batches of like-stuff, or random lots of 24 folders, which had to be done one at a time, but once I'd got a rhythm going the time slid-by, until - suddenly - it was done! I even found a few folders which had been lost on the old machine, but I still have a lot of sorting and minor 'housekeeping' to finish!

One of the folders I found was this bunch of squirrels, which is a bit Easter'y, he says; watching them all charging around in the beech trees, over the road, as I type!

The original starter for the folder was a TBS bag heading into storage a while ago, nothing too exciting, with an R&L 'Stretch Pet' cereal premium/novelty telescopic one at back left, and the Schleich one from Mum's cake-decoration tub, back right, it'll now join the rest of the animals, having done sterling service on chocolate-logs for years now! And, I know; two rabbits and some other less than tree-squirrel types!

 

In front are a bunch of more cartoony ones, with the grey one on the right having some age I suspect (1970's?) and the little one's a Kinder type. The two on the left go together - I can't work out if they are cake-candle holders or missing something? While the other two with their contrasting tummy paint look like they may go together, but I'm not sure that they do, just both following the Hollywood cartoon trope re. decoration!

 

This was in our bedroom when we were kids, and it was sort of accepted I'd inherit it one day (my brother got the silver dragon match-box!), cold-painted bronze, probably German. It would be employed as a night-light during the power-cuts of the 1970's, Mum would put a new candle in it, and in the morning there'd be an interesting stalagmite growing off the roots, to be removed with satisfying waxy 'snaps'!

The glass was cracked and went to recycling about 18-months ago, but I've seen packets of them for affordable sale on evilBay, so I'll sort that at the other-end, it's in storage now. Lead weighted and with the squirrel a separate piece who can be removed for cleaning, the long branch makes a carrying handle, and I love it!

 

Shot these last night to fatten the folder/post! The one on the right is a copy of the Schleich one, so I assume the - very Easter - hare is too? Modern Chinese and from a mixed lot, which may have been from Peter Evans or Chris Smith, so thanks to both for everything. They follow the pattern of those cheap two-half dinosaurs I found in Farnborough a few years back?

Anyway, that's a few squirrels . . . and things; Happy Easter readers!

D is for Dredd, Judge Dredd!

We looked at the Rogue Trooper set just over 14 years ago here at small scale world, but Games Workshop have returned to the output of the classic comic 2000AD several times, more commonly visiting the Judge Dredd franchise, so we'd better visit it here!

 

I'm monging-it at home with a lurgy this week and have managed to get some of the image-folder disaster sorted; this turned-up, and as it's been in the queue for a year or two, so I thought it could be cleared!

Most of the sets/modules seem to be paper/counter-based, with the possibility of purchasing lead/whitemetal figurines from the Nottingham Mafia as after-market stuff to enhance the experience, and when you search for this on feeBay, make sure you get this artwork, or you'll be getting one of the others!

 

Because . . . unlike those other sets . . . this set contains almost perfect OO/1:76th/23mm figures of Judge Dredd, as playing pieces, they aren't the world's best renditions/depictions of the eponymous hero (actually quite a fascistic, over-patriotic, violent, anti-hero!); his 'Lawgiver' sidearm is more of a needle-gun, but they do come in six colours!

 

Compared here with an Airfix pilot, you can see that the Dredd figures are perfect for rounding up a bunch of Preiser or Noch civilians, whether they've done anything wrong or not; everyone's a 'Perp' if you investigate deep enough!

 

The accompanying paperwork had lots of references to the artwork and tropes of the comic-strip, which at the time had become so ubiquitous it was running daily in a National newspaper! I vaguely remember a story-line involving Umpty Candy, adulterated and leading to mayhem of one kind or another - usually mass-hysteria in the accommodation 'Blocks' of the Mega-City.

 

An advert from Toy Trader in 1982 drumming-up business for the venture.

H is for How They Come In - More Charity Shop Stuff!

Still haven't found the old charity shop posts/folders for posts, but these have all been picked-up in the last few weeks, so a ramble through some eclectic shite tonight!

This was an afternoon's pass down the high street with bits from two or three shops, highlights (and some lowlights!) below, and I only bought the puzzle-cube erasers because they were cheap and I didn't trust myself to remember the Works branding if I left them, they will go on the jig-puzzle page with the others in the fullness of time!

The K&M knights (and the Polytoys one) are duplicates I think and the rest is pretty awful stuff, but boxes have to be ticked here or - eventually - on the A-Z Blogs, so . . . meh! The two Sesame Street figures have a bit more value, collection-wise rather than monetary, Bully I think?

Various dinosaurs; the upper shot looks to be a set and most of a set at that, the origianl tub maybe haveing four of everything (B&M or Terra by Batat?), and I have a long term plan of doing a single post or page on all the small vinyls to ID them all in one place!

Below them larger models with again most of a set - quite nicely painted - top right, an older Chinasaur, probably Holly Toys along with a couple of dinorasers . . . aaaannnd  . . . a Facehugger; the real reason the Dinosaurs died out!

The rest of the rubber shite in the tubs included a bunch of 'kins from various MGB, Moose and Zuru lines, I haven't looked at it properly yet, it went straight to storage back in Feb'.

This was a lucky find, a bunch of mint (obviously ex-shop-stock) cake decorations in a basket for 20p-a-pop, so I emptied it!

Close-ups; we got the three big Lik Be's, five smaller robot ones, a Kinder/Giodi/Bruder space-type, four old-fashioned cars (the real find) and four matching, die-cast, model motorcycles with different paint.

Two sub-scale tanks, smaller versions of the old Zee Toys line, I think they have been ID'd on one of the die-cast forums, but I've not looked too hard for the reference so no brand here today! A big bag of farm, and the mouse on a barrel, made-up another pass down the high-street a week or so later.

 

I had passed on the mouse several times since way before Christmas, but began to feel sorry for his unsold arse and took him home, he's resin, and a reasonable sculpt, but oversized for the barrel, unless it's a dolls-house barrel?

Contents of the farm bag; the only real items of interest here are the four top centre with the green bases, as they are more of those Timpo solid's sculpts in PVC, it's begining to look like someone (possibly in Macau) got the moulds from Shots? We looked at the cats before here, and there's definitely a story behind these soft rubber 'Timpo's'?

I'll also highlight the Stay Puffed faux-mascot from Ghostbusters, must have moonlighted as a scarecrow!

I only managed one buy in March, a rather truncated totem-pole of the Canadian tourist keepsake type, looking like chalkware, but really washed resin.