Toy collecting, especially antique tin and wooden toys, as an investment is a relatively recent phenomenon. It started to get serious in the mid-’60s with prices and demand is driven largely by interest from the USA. By the mid-eighties, the market really took off. Toy prices in the USA and around the world started going through the roof. In 1988 the sale of the contents of Leon J Perelman’s Toy Museum generated over $5 million in just 24 hours for…
I’ve taken a close look at our recent sales statistics to compile this list of traditional wooden toys that continue to be immensely popular: Jacobs Ladder: This is a very popular traditional folk toy consisting of wooden blocks that are held together with ribbon. When the toy is held at one end the illusion of a block tumbling down the ladder is created. Fascinating fun. Junior Carpenter Set: This brilliant carpentry set continues to be extremely popular. It consists of…
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…