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Showing results for tags '7100/750 Educational Sets'.
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The largest USA/Canada sets of the 20th Century...
LEGO Historian posted a topic in General LEGO Discussion
These sets are so rare, that they are likely unknown to all USA/Canada LEGO collectors. They were likely produced from circa 1963-65, and are among the earliest institutional LEGO sets. The sets are the 750 and 7100 Educational Sets of the mid 1960s. These were Samsonite LEGO sets, and likely produced at the Stratford Ontario and Loveland Colorado Samsonite plants. The 7100 set is the largest volume LEGO box of all time (including any of the mega-sets of today). It is an enormous 3,250 piece wooden box set, that sold for $100 in the USA (less if you were an institution), likely about $110 in Canada. I know of only 1 example of this very rare set. There are none of these in the Vault in Billund Denmark. Infact TLG has no records of this set, which is not really that unusual, since what Samsonite did in their USA and Canada subsidiaries was often unknown to Billund. Here is the very very rare 3,250 piece 7100 set.... And until recently, the 750 set was totally unknown, except being mentioned as a $50 set in mid 1960s Samsonite LEGO retailer reorder catalogs. I finally found an image from a Canadian 1960s LEGO Junior Designers Club brochure. And wouldn't you know... it had the same look as the 7100 set, just smaller.... This 750 set is unknown in any collection, and would command a steep price (as would another 7100 set). The 750 set likely contains about 1500-1600 parts, and cost $50 in the USA, and likely $55 in Canada back in the mid 1960s. Here is a copy of the fall 1965 Samsonite USA Retailer Order form (with the set numbers as the black numbers within the "Stock Number" area: These same sets were sold in Canada (at a little higher price), and for both countries, this sheet shows the transition between the early 1960s Town Plan sets and the later 1960s Samsonite LEGO sets where the set number equals the parts count (as seen below the heavy black line in the left part of the order form). I enjoy finding images of old order forms or retailer catalogs... they provide a snapshot of LEGO at an exact moment in time. And until I came across that Canadian brochure with that 750 set as a contest prize... I had never even seen an image of one... Enjoy! Gary Istok P.S. These very rare wooden box sets can be found (with 80+ other LEGO wooden box sets) in Chapter 15 of my 2,800 page 73 chapter LEGO DVD download (found in the Bazaar here). Only about 10 wooden box sets are found in any online database).