Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
It may seem incredible to be thinking about Christmas in the middle of the summer (what summer ?!?) but that’s what we do every year at this time as we finalise our autumn & winter catalogue. All the toy manufacturers and retailers will have been gearing up for the past few months as the Christmas season begins as soon as the summer holidays are over.
We’re adding a couple more pages of wooden toys this year – which have always been our strongest area – because we know how popular they are, what good value they represent and how durable they are compared with the plastic we try to avoid. Now it seems we’re being followed by Hamleys & Argos who, according to today’s Times, are predicting a return to traditional toys this year. Hamleys are quoted as saying "Parents are likely to go for old favourites and solid, reliable materials, such as wood." Well we could have told them that because so far as we’re concerned wooden toys are always popular.
Apparently it is predicted that the best sellers this year will be "Barbie, Lego and Transformers" all of which are now classed as traditional toys. Blimey – a Transformer a traditional toy? What about the good old snakes & ladders or a pop-gun, or maybe a nice wooden Noah’s Ark? Now those really are traditional toys.
Posted in The History of Toys & Games, Traditional Toys, Wooden Toys | No Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
There’s a nicely written piece about traditional games on Time Magazine’s website with the author describing how he and his primary schoolmates played marbles in the playground in the 1970s. No doubt he thinks that makes him sound old, but I could have written the same about my primary school in the 1950s and I reckon if I asked my father – now in his 80s – he could have done the same for the 1920s and ’30s. But in a way that’s the point of the article.
The author reckons marbles are as popular as ever – and they have been played since Roman times – and by-the-by points out that a child needs no instructions on how to play with them, nor ever did. That pretty much sums up the appeal of so many traditional toys. Simple, straightforward but still fun. And isn’t there something reassuring, in this constantly changing world, in knowing that children get the same enjoyment out of a simple game that their forebears did generations ago?
Posted in Games, The History of Toys & Games, Traditional Toys | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
We didn’t realise it but it turns out we’re celebrating our 400th anniversary this year, in a here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush sort of way. Today’s Times carries a fascinating letter – if slightly arcane – from the Master of the Garden of the Inner Temple, London (no less) explaining the provenance of the two mulberry trees that grow there. It emerges that the mulberry was introduced into England exactly 400 years ago, in 1608, by James I in an attempt to build a luxury goods manufacturing base here. Only he chose the wrong kind of Mulberry. I thought that sort of flawed decision making was a more recent British thing, but obviously we’ve been doing it for centuries.
What would children have sung about I wonder, and what would we have called our company, if the first Jacobean monarch had not shown this entrepreneurial flair?
Posted in Mulberry Bush, The History of Toys & Games | No Comments »