H is for How They come In - Charity Shop Score

Back to mid-November with this one (Oh, I'm getting it all back into shape!), I had a swift shoot through the charity shops in town one Wednesday arvo' (best day for toys for some reason?), and managed to grab some useful/half-useful bits and bobs!

This was the bulk of it with a tank from British Heart Foundation, a bag of bits from Blue Cross (animal welfare charity/vets), and a couple of similar junk bags from Scope or Phillis Tuckwell?

This was shot separately, and came from the DEBRA shop (skin conditions?), obviously a faux-ivory ornament (Scandinavian museum gift-shop?), it's not far off 54mm (closer to 50, but with a thick slate base!) and the sculpture is all-plastic, so it will go with all the Britains, Marx, MPC and Timpo arctic stuff!

Contents of the three mixed bags. Nothing exciting, but I think the five in the upper shot must be from some current kid's thing, to the lower right are Kinder bits, and what might be board game figures from another juvenile franchise? Bottom left is a real junk lot, but it has another variant of those pop-up aliens we've seen from Henbrandt and Unique.

The tank; I suspect a late Maplin's Crimbo-gift type, it had an R/C unit at some point which has gone missing, so I will remove the aerial. It can move without the motor interfering anyway, and a generic soviet model with more 64/72 than T62 about it?

The next day I picked this up, only of interest as it is the same odd selection as one we looked at a few years ago, and the question marks are all duplicated, so clearly this was an odd set, with two polar bears, the oversized (and better sculpted) 'baby' bear, orangutang and panda, two hippo sculpts & etc? Doesn't prove much without a brand, but all helps join the dots, and I'm sure the info' will all be on STS when I get round to looking!

Ph is for Phidal Phalls Phlat!

It's been fun following Phidal since whenever, and they are mostly fun figures, so hopefully I will continue to do so, but in the best traditions of We Buy This Shit So You Don't Have To, I purchased a couple of the Tattle Tales (see previous post), even though I had a certain sense of foreboding, but not being able to get the Blog up in store to check the previous posts, I had to take a punt . . . for you, Loyal Readers!

My suspicion was that the contents were existing figures from the standard My Busy Book range, and in that I was correct! I can't tell you if another box has another four poses, as the original set they're taken from - which we saw here - had twelve poses?

But yeah, if you've got the older sets, don't get these small ones, they're duplicates, I've checked the Princesses too, and I also bought the Lightyear one, which I haven't even included in this post as we only saw the ten-figure version recently, and you may have worked out the duplication from the box-shot in the previous post . . . So, disappointing, but if they become the norm and start to get new sculpts - I'll let you know!

S is for Shelfies - A Roundup II

Mid Jan' found me back at The Range, looking for paint or something . . . cat tower? And I spotted these, they're . . . 

. . . not the best shot, but it was an afterthought, I just can't believe the shite being offered and/or bought by people, even as the planet dies in front of their eyes! TKMaxx/Homesense, B&M, Dunelm and The Range are full of this stuff, a sort of hollow-cast/slip-cast resinated clay, they are all supposed to have a butterfly on their nose, most just have a jagged-hole, was it customer vandalism, or did they unpack like that from Asia, and why have they been left there? If we're still here in 20-years; I'm going to be pleasantly surprised!

A few days later found me back at TKMaxx, and shooting HTI again, but not in search of bathroom accessories, nor in Basingrad, but popping into the Farnborough Gate one (bigger, but not necessarily better than Basingstoke) after visiting one of the other stores (probably during the Laptop debacle!), and the reason I said maybe firefighters in the previous post is because I already knew there were pit-crew!

Obviously not interested in the large carry-case (his tail is in the red card compartment), but the smallies, which as I mentioned the other day, is one of my aims to catalogue and ID, as many of as I can, on a single page at some point, so that's a set of five, courtesy of an outfit called Geemac Sales & Marketing  - box ticked!

This is a different kind of shelfie all together, shot in the Phillis Tuckwell charity shop here in Fleet, it's a hand-made, box-diorama, doll's house and I thought (afterwards) that the left-hand figure could be converted to Pooh Bear with the addition of a longer nose and some yellow-paint! It was 20-quid which is steepish for a charity shop, but a lovely thing!

These were fun, but a bit too juvenile to purchase (although I have some similar Llamas in resin so who am I? To cast aspersions!), therefore I shelfied them in passing. New from Phidal Publishing, and possibly aimed at even younger readers than the My Busy Books, you get four models per My Mini Busy Book.

These were also new from Phidal; large-piece puzzles (no figures), magnetic sketching sets (also no figures) and 'Tattle Tales' with figures, but more on them in a future post, suffice to say they are a disappointment!

 

I'm gussing these are all part of the 'Cost of Living Crisis', priced as they are, the same as old Busy Books used to be, while the Busy Books themselves (there are one or two in the queue I think) have gone up a pound to £6.99 here

S is for Shelfies - A Roundup I

Just a few bits and bobs which have piled-up, got lost, been found and sent somewhere else, brought back together and split into two posts and with several of them; duplicated at one point! The first shot actually goes back to last October, and got really lost for a while . . .

. . . not exciting, but shot in a newsagent (or Sainsbury's?), not so fussed by the funny little semi-flat ones above, but I thought I'd better grab a shelfie of the four-inch (or thereabouts) Disney Princesses as they may turn-up in mixed/job-lots in a year or two. Paint Your Own Frozen . . . and not the first time I've seen them.

Then in December, a visit to TKMaxx (I think) found this wild animal set from Ravensden. The giraffe wasn't quite as bad a sculpt as this forshorteing suggests, but it wasn't the best either and the tiger looked decidedly demented! The elephant's alright, but his tusks are a bit short/fat, but it puts a name to them!

 

At the same time I shot this lot from Playtek LLC, who I think we've seen before here as a brand, probably also in TKMaxx, bigger, they are less likely to appear in mixed lots of toy soldiers, but for animal collectors, may need a box-tick at some point!

While 'Maxx often turns-up these die-cast vehicle sets from HTI with a few figures, here road workers, but Peter Evans has sent me several Police (extant, or forthcoming posts) with similar bases, possibly from the Toy Project's charity shop in North London. 40mm and a replacement PVC-alike polymer, I dare say there are firefighters too?

A few days later, but still close to Christmas I shot these in The Range in Aldershot (I was rushing around trying to buy bathroom storage with suckers on because of the no glueing/drilling rule in the new flat!); two takes on T-Rex, although I thought the one on the right looked a little more Allosaur to me?

But, again, both Paint Your Own kits, from unbranded on the left (credited to and possibly clearance from Universal themselves, I assume they have gift-shops in their theme parks?), and Kandytoys on the right. One has a useful base, the other is going to keep falling over!

Finally, and an hour later I was at B&M in Basingrad (still looking for bathroom accessories) and I shot this, normally I only give the little vehicles a quick one-over for military or space, but this can be built-upon with Hestair Kiddybricks or Megabloks (other compatible building systems exist!), which I thought was novelty enough for inclusion here! Titled 'Brick Rides' this one is Bricking Trails.

C is for Combex's Cruising Crayon Carving Craft!

Picked this up the other day, little rocket pencil sharpener, although, it's not that little; it's nearly ten-inches of pulp-cover, Space Age, interstellar loveliness, from Combex, that [not] very well known ex-comb maker! Geddit! Lots of useful stuff here.

To give a sense of the size, it's here posed with some Giant clones and a couple of Keshi eraser types I happened to have to hand. Clearly this was more of a desktop novelty than a pencil-case thing, and I'm a bit gutted I never found one in my Christmas stocking, because clearly it belonged there!

 

The whole ship is hollow, so you can literally disintegrate most of the contents of your pencil-case, in one sitting, should you be minded to! And the seven-vent engine-bay is removable to empty the contents. Maybe, it was sold AS a pencil-case, possibly even having some pencils secreted within, it could easily take five or six . . . anyone know? Yes it was, see comments/Graces Guide page (link below) - 1954! It's 69!

 

There are two launching 'rails' moulded on the underside, so it was a horizontal launcher, a popular launch method in early fiction, whether fired as projectiles or using some magnetic-levitation device, or sequential-explosion (multi-chamber) accelerator. There is interesting stuff being done to deliver small payloads with a giant revolving sling-shot arm, at the moment.

Posed with what I think might be early (very clean/sharp mouldings), factory-painted (more in a later post), Premier space-ship escorts, I think the far one is what Ed Berg has dubbed a 5" Dart - version 6, and the near one is a 3" Wide Body - version 1?

 

Obviously, with the rails on the underside, giving an 'up' and 'down', I never really thought to photograph the red side! So black-top and red-bottom/wings, and it's pretty awesome!

H is for Heraldry

Not the products of Messrs W. Britains, but something which was in the queue, and of which I was reminded by the anon' commenter on one of the recent bookplate posts, namely: the reproduction of coats of arms on medieval toy soldier's shields.

Some of you may have come across the above sheets on fleaBay, sold separately and for little outlay, the sheet on top is replacement paper shields for the earlier designs of Britains Deetail knights, with six each of the first designs (I remember them hitting the shops) and three each for the slightly later additional designs.

 

The sheet below consists of one each of twenty-five new designs, some of which are probably real, only by dint of the number of arms issued over the centuries? By which I mean that the maker (0arron0 on feebay) is inventing them, but by following the rules of heraldry, some may well have been extant in real life; or, 'IRL' as the brain-dead generation puts it!

I thought to contact the seller (Arron Wood) after my purchase with the possibility of getting the family arms done; a conceit, but harmless, and he was amenable to the idea, therein began an eMail exchange, and a few draft versions, before the lower sheet here appeared on evilBay, with a quick note from Arron. He did 12 of the one I use from the bookplate (it’s a dodgy right to do so mind, inheriting through the female line; I think they should have a diagonal line over them?), and a few others which we found on Google!

He has also done another sheet of 'imaginobles' for those looking for some variety with their Deetail knights, or any others fitted with similar sized/shaped smooth shields - some of the vintage French hard-plastics, Herald Hong Kong, Accurate/Revell or possibly the Gemodels set?

 

The reasoning behind the alternative designs are twofold, firstly; the surplus (after my purchase) sheets needed to sell to people who probably wouldn't want 30 identical shields and secondly; when a landowner gets the call to turn-out for his king or liege-lord, he turns up with various other members of the extended family, sons, brothers, cousins &etc, and they - under the rules of Heraldry - have different shield designs, but following the family theme. I think the three black-on-white is almost the default or generic one for Sussex Halls?

 

Google produced various Halls and a few which upon closer inspection proved to be Hallstons or Hallburgs or something, one was just Bauman! Anyway, there were several with the three Talbots in black, and while they are more commonly black in heraldry, some Halls do use the white ones, hence Arron's sheet choice, and while we ignored the 'swans', actually Cranes (Irish Halls from Donegal) on the sheet, we do have Irish relations, and we're Catholic, on Mum's side (I think?), so there may be a closer connection. I rather like the Canadian-looking dragon.

This isn't going to become a history lesson or a lecture on heraldry, both of which are convoluted affairs, but it seems the Scottish Halls are the oldest (similar to the Irish arms but brown field), ex-Norman knights, settled in Scotland in the 1360/70's, and a branch of them gives the chevron with Talbots, while our 'Sussex Halls' are probably a sub-branch of the Essex branch (1700's)?

The one I used for my Favicon years ago is on the left, and the one I sent Arron to work with is on the right, neither are brilliant, but at the sizes they show, they look fine, and Arron cleaned them up and gave them the correct little red tongues.

 

Arron is open to commissions, but only if you're serious, so I have his eMail if anyone has a bright idea for a sheet of new/personalised shield designs for Britains Deetial, eMail me for his details, don't approach him on eBay (as I did) as evilBay may get pissed off if they think there's off-platform stuff going-on, not that there will be; Arron will get a dozen or so printed off (or more if you arrange it with him?) and tell you when they are ready to buy, so what you don't purchase will be available to others, therefore you don't need a fortune.

And many thanks to Arron Wood for putting-up with my backseat designing, and for producing a brilliant sheet. When I get round to it, I'm going to have a squad of Halls Templer all in black and white, to fight my Saracens!

B is for Bookplates - 5 - Mine

Some of you will be pleased to learn this is the last of these . . . for now; we will return to them in the fullness of time, along with the previously mentioned book-marks, one of which, a novelty polymer one, came in with a mixed-lot this afternoon!

So having been introduced to bookplates at a young age; 6 or 7 maybe, and knowing Mum had one, I had a hankering for one as I began to accumulate books myself, in my teens, when I was also visiting Thomas Thorp's myself, as a customer, on my way to and from Art Collage!

 

And these sketches date from that time (1981-3), I was actually working on an/my graphic interpretation of Celtic artwork, quite the hippy! These were in part for a Tattoo I never actually got done! Something which ironically pleases me now, given that every other buggers' got them, they've rather lost their cache, in their commonality.

 

You can see there's a bit of 'Slimfont' work going on as well, and a simplified version of the dragon ended-up on my carved tile, might-be-Roman, coaster.

This is where it would lead about 15 years later, these are a few colour studies I did on some photocopies, in various sizes, with my treasured magic markers - long since dried-out. Colour really doesn't work on bookplates, I don't know why, but they almost demand to be left understated! If I had to use one in would be the browns on the right, I'm a sucker for Autumnal colours!

 

Working out the layout and lettering, clearly 'slimfont' wasn't far away once I'd gone with the circles or bubbles concept! And my middle initial 'D' was dropped as it was going to obscure the tail . . . yeah, it's an embryo!

 

The two scraps of paper top-centre look like they might be the margins of 'Model and Collectors Mart'! Long-gone now I think!

 

I don't know what I was doing here, the cut-outs are presumably because I thought about reversing the image (no computer still! '97-98?), while the larger image (actually the same size as both the cut-outs and the tracing) might have been half-an-idea for a sundial?

The little blue sketch may be the first version, but therein lies the problem with the whole design, I eschewed the designs which used the tracing of rights-free stuff, and commercial lettering, for something wholly my own work . . . for my own bookplate; makes sense, right?

But . . . one of the books I bought at Thorp's, back in the nineteen-eighties, was the English-language, full-colour version of Frenchman Philip Druillet's Lone Slone/Delirius, published by Dragon's Dream, and, on the large, double page spread of his lovemaking with some universal god-head's daughter/princess (or something, I can't check as it's in storage), there are a bunch of bubbles and planets and stuff at the top of the page/panel, including something looking suspiciously like this?

 

And there is issue; there is a child produced by the union, it is being conceived in the panel-image, so it is an embryo! Now it would be wrong of me to claim this is an original, if it's derivative of the master's work!

 

In my defence, at art collage you are taught to sketch anything you like, anything that takes your fancy, something which was only reinforced many years later when we had to visit museums and produce copious works of what we saw, while at university as a mature student. After all, the great architect Santiago Calatrava is known to have based his overhead rail gantries on a sketch of a bull's head!

Now when I was working on the bookplate, I was sure I was dealing with a funny little sketch of a planet or something, and while I decided it did indeed look like an alien embryo and, if developed along those lines, would have connections to the embryonic ideas that come out of reading &etc . . . I also have to face the fact that by subconscious accident or forgetful design, I probably ripped-off Mr. Druillet! Hay-ho, I'm stuck with it now and it's stuck into thousands of my books!

But it's only stuck into the art/architecture/design and collectables/modelling/wargaming libraries, so I may return to the old designs, or make a new one altogether, when I get the rest plated-up in the next few years.

 

Perhaps one of the Oriental ones (previous-but-one post) could be used for my late mother's library of oriental art, ceramics and persian carpets, with a new one (I have half an idea for one with a rabbit in the bottom left corner and a distant warren in the background, top-right) for the natural sciences? And I'll need one for the History/military books? I wouldn't use bookplates for fiction, I find it an ephemeral art!

Oh, and if you find this bookplate in either of Michael Maughan's 1st or 2nd volumes of the Timpo guide, the Great Book of Corgi OR any of the Hornby Companion series (landscape hardbacks), they are mine, and the person who has them - shouldn't have, I think some may be in Colorado, if not they are long gone as the other suspect (and there were only ever the two) is dead! But the books are still mine!

F is for Follow-up - The Works' Dinosaur Eggs

We looked at these here, and while they then disappeared from the local store, I did then manage to find a straggler, in another store a while later, and this is it;

A fully-fleshed Kerthunkasurus and a Dimetrodon on a hard-diet! It didn't have the scenic elements, but both animals are a tad bigger than the ones we saw last time, when I mentioned that other contents weren't even that figural, so it seems one or more Chinese factories were clearing end-of-line stuff in mixed-contents capsules! Hopefully in the fullness of time, I'll find a better brand or brands for them than The Works?

B is for Bookplates - 4 - Drafts

We arrive at my efforts! It took me a while to get round to doing a bookplate for myself, although there were half-hearted attempts at them when I was a teenager, those efforts are somewhere in the storage unit!

Here I've copied some stuff, a woman, and some graphics from Mecanorma and/or Lettraset catalogues, which I've enlarged, in order to better trace those elements I wanted to use/transfer to the draft design.

 

Now, I can't for the life of me remember how I arrived at these coloured copies of the lady, or where she came from? At that time I had no copier, no computer . . . and the corner shop's photocopier might have had an enlarge feature, but I don't remember it being a colour machine, nor do the Lettraset and Mecanorma (French equivalent of Lettraset) catalogues have any colour artwork, as far as I can remember?

 

These sketches will date from around 1997/8, and I just don't know how I had the ability to produce these working scraps, but clearly I did! And having done so, got to work on them . . .

 

. . . first by reversing the image, and again; how? No feature like that on a photocopier? No computer until 2007? How can one totally forget a whole process? I normally have a very good memory (it's one of the features of Asperger's), but this is all a blank!

 

Anyway, you can see how I was going to join the two girls hair together to make the outer frame of the design, while on the right I'm using tracing-paper to lift some of the dry-transfer elements and try to bring them together in a more unified structure, I've drawn some new hair in, having traced her without her hair.

But again adding to the mystery, the two girls in the left-hand image have had all their lines go A) very broad and sausage-like, and B) there's a negative, white-space, thing going-on where the lines cross . . . I do have a vague memory of that being a negative-feature of the enlarging process, maybe I had help producing the preliminary materials from the studio guys at the sign fitting company I was working at.

 

They had Adobe, I think, matched with CorelDraw? Probably running on Windows 95? If she's a rights-free piece of clip-art, it would have been easy for Jason or Matt to enlarge, reverse one, and print them off for me?

 

However, I seem to have lost interest in a naked, fantasy princess bookplate, quite quickly and moved on to something more oriental, again using tracing to take images from a rights-free, images portfolio, which I'd bought from the previously mentioned Thomas Thorpe's in Guildford, many years earlier while at art collage!

 

And yes, that's a typo, but it took me until I was today-year's-old to realise it is Mecanorma, not Mecanorama . . . classic word-blindness! Googling Mikado as a typeface leads to a kids-friendly 'chunky' design and a couple of bog-standard and rather boring sans-serif types, which wouldn't have interested me then or now.

But, I did find a seller on Etsy who has a few sheets of the Mecanorma original for sale, and you can see that the note (on the back of the design - you can just see it through the paper) was pointing to a nice oriental typeface for which to produce the 'Ex Libris' and/or any name.

 

Meanwhile, this design had also been taken to, if not a near finished stage, at least a stage where you could see what the final design would look like? It may even have come before the one above - it has a certain air of abandonment about it?

 

I guess I would have been looking for a bamboo effect letter type? And no; I have no idea what happened or was due to happen on the 22nd, nor indeed, which month, but again, 1997 is a safe bet, or 1998!

I may return to these and get them finished as commercial prospects in a year or two, these days there's plenty of places like evilBay and Etsy to shift this kind of bespoke stuff, and production costs have come right down with home-computing, desktop publishing and the like, and I think there's a ream of licky-sticky paper in my stuff somewhere, but it may be a solid brick by now!

W is for Walking Wounded!

A quick seasonal return to the Dutch, DS Plastics egg-animals from Theo, following the mending of the legs so cruelly snapped in transit!

A reminder of the catalogue image, the dog belongs to another set/catalogue item, but 437 is the 'egg animals' and while the concept, as a joke, works well for the birds, I'm not so sure if you can associate the hare with eggs, beyond the obvious Easter reference, hence this seasonal post!

It was the red duck and the green chicken which lost their legs in transit, and speaking as someone who has little bags and trays of mending or finishing-off 'projects' all over the estate, it does help if you do any mending when the breaks/damage are fresh, as clean breaks glue better!

The chicken, cockerel and hare are illustrated in the catalogue, but the presence of the duck-sculpt, suggests there may be others, I suspect not, only because I can't think of another obviously Easter'y one . . . goose, hedgehog, so maybe this is it, but you never know?

Other seasonal items offered in the wholesale catalogue include 014, a large egg which will be half opaque, coloured plastic and half transparent, it would have contained mini, chocolate eggs or a selection of small novelties, such as those also supplied by DS Plastics to De Gruyter 'lucky bags'.

Items 010 and 026 seem to be similar smaller 'capsule toy' eggs, but are found on different pages, so may have size differences in the accompanying price-list, missing here? It should also be mentioned that research by Dutch collectors has revealed some (but not all) of DS's catalogue were ex-Siku tools.

Invisible mend! I wasn't happy with the size of the ducks in the collage, but collaging three items is never as easy as two or four! Many thanks to Theo van der Werden for both the animals and the catalogue scans.

B is for Bookplates - 3 - Mum

And so we get to Mum's bookplate, for which I've found some of the 'working's out', which may be of interest to anyone thinking of designing one for themselves.

 

Listening to the obituary for Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the 'singing nun' (aka the 'honky-tonk nun'), who was so much more, on the Radio, earlier this evening, it was saddening to learn she won a two-year scholarship to London's Royal Academy, but which, for reasons unknown, she never took it up, because a similar thing happened to my Mother.

 

She won a scholarship to the Slade, but never took it up and I never filly understood why, but it seems it was a combination of Orwellian post-war socialist means-testing, pride within the family and sexism; Uncle Johnny (male, firstborn) did go to Uni'? Doubly frustrating to miss-out, as the period she would have been there (the Slade) was among its high-points.

Anyway, suffice to say Mum clearly had a natural talent for such things, and some of the sketches she produced for her silversmithing designs are exquisite, although I haven't found her wild strawberry watercolour which was always my favourite?

 

These preliminary sketches/further studies are on two sides of an old envelope! Would it be 'airmail' with those blue stripes? She decided upon the family coat of arms (more of which in a future post), within a diamond or - heraldically speaking - a lozenge (when inherited through the female line) and having reproduced it on a photocopier (?) tried out a few layouts, and there may be more lost stages/preliminaries, this is just what I've found. To be honest, I prefer the lettering of the upper one?

The finished article, I don't know what the rule is with bookplates, but I am pasting mine over the bottom-right-hand quarter, so you can still read most of the one underneath and get one whole Talbot (what heraldic dogs are called; a now-lost hunting breed), unless it's a small volume or a cramped position (due to text layout or something) in which case I put mine right-over, which has a sad finality to it, almost the feeling of treading on a grave?

 

EAH, was her maiden name, Elizabeth Anne Hall, while Liz W was obviously for her married name; Walter.

Here's a working drawing for a design she did for a friend, I don't know if it ever went to print, and they eventually fell-out (over a Japanese submarine-commander's Katana parts of all things), despite remaining colleagues for several more years, but the details of such 'skeletons' pass with the parties concerned!

 

Like coins or stamps (or bottle caps, matchbook/boxes, cheese or cigar labels, travel/restaurant sugar packets - all the small collectables/paper ephemera!), the trick with bookplates is to produce a design which is interesting and aesthetically pleasing, yet also carries a certain amount of information in a small area, without it being unreadable and/or too busy or too plain. I'm not going to judge Mum's out-loud, but you can judge mine next!