LEGO Historian

Ask and you shall receive! The very first LEGO promotional item was in 1955 in Denmark. Esso Service Stations there were giving out little LEGO #250 Bedford Esso Tanker Trucks. These were introduced as part of the LEGO 1:87 Town Plan series of cars in 1955. The Esso promotional versions came without any glass to the windows... while the LEGO versions did. Here is an image of this rare 1955 promotion... and the Esso box (no mention of LEGO) it came it. The "Esso Oil Drop Man" was a mascot of that era, and shows up on some of the promotional LEGO 1:87 boxes....

Weetabix is a cereal that American's know very little about... having been mostly sold in Britain and I believe Australia. But old time LEGO collectors recognize the name of this British "Cream of Wheat" type chocolate breafast food as a major rarity among promotional sets. In 1976 Weetabix sponsored a LEGO promotion for the breakfast food involving 3 small LEGO sets... a Windmill set, and 2 "semi-detached" Townhouse sets. Well recently a flyer of this promotion was discovered... and it shows that all 3 model sets were part of the same promotion... and these all came in the same box (packed separately). So these were actually all the same set... you could only order the trio as a "LEGO Village"... and not separately. Here is the rare promotional flyer... Although these are boxed separately... they all come in a plain brown shipping box... with an insert holding the 3 separate boxes. So these should really be labeled as a single item... but since they don't come in a numbered set, posting them separately is acceptible... especially if one doesn't have all three. Another even older Weetabix (first) promotional set was the 1970 released Weetabix Castle.... This castle set also came in a plain brown shipping box... but loose in that box (no sub-box). And even though this castle shows only an oval LEGO flag... this set also came with an additional flag... the UK flag. These Weetabix sets are highly collectible, and are found in my Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Collectors Guide... in the chapter with over 100 promotional LEGO sets of 1955-2006.

.... well then you won't want to know what I did with some old classic LEGO windows.... I've got thousands of old classic LEGO windows... and among them were a few hundred "glass-less" and miscolored ones that were of no use in building.... except when I got an exact match to ABS black color.... http://www.bricklink...P=29&colorID=11 http://www.bricklink...7026&colorID=11 I use "repainted" windows in a few of my buildings. However, I make sure to always leave some of the back sides to these unpainted... so that they won't be mistaken on the secondary market, should something ever happen to me.

Besides the classic windows and doors, there were a more limited Pick-A-Bricks selection available in the 1950s and early 1960s... but only in Denmark and Norway. From 1950-65 LEGO bricks were available as individual pick a bricks from LEGO retailers in Denmark... and in Norway they were available from 1954-58. After 1958 bricks were only avaialbe in Norway from spare parts packs... ditto for Denmark starting in 1966. Here are some early Danish retailer boxes. The retailers bought the bricks in small cardboard boxes of 25-100, depending on size... and dumped them into the larger boxes. The tall AUTOMATIC BINDING BRICKS boxes were used from 1950-53.... the long shallow boxes were used from 1953-65. LEGO elements were sold individually based on size of part.

I've had the 30 high res images of the entries to the 1985 Paris Centre Pompidou LEGO Exhibition... these were created by 30 leading European architects, who were given a blank canvas of unlimited parts to build a "villa" or "dream house" of their choice.... some of these have found their way to The World of LEGO Toys book of 1987. I did a prototype of a poster of all 30 of these images... (although I only used 27 of them in this trial run. I'm going to be offering them to anyone who buys my Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Guide (1949-1990s) and it will be retroactive... The final 30 (only 27 are shown so far)... will have room in the lower right that will have the 1934 (first of all time) LEGO logo in English scrip. This is going to be made available as a download from the cloud (since it is about 40MB, it's too large as an EMAIL)... and as soon I'm done with it, I'll be putting it there. This poster will also be made available as a freebie to ALL other Eurobricks members... but as a smaller size image... such as for Computer Desktop, or standard frame size, if so desired. I'm working on finishing the poster size image in a standard poster size that folks can take to Kinko's/FedEx, or other print shops (via a jump drive)... for printing on quality paper... or to print at any size you want. The final image will not have the text underneath the pictures, and it will be perfectly spaced between images. Stay Tuned!!

Looks like a very difficult build..... I hope that it won't have a bazillion SNOT techniques....

$44 in white... only 1 available... and $2 for a metallic silver... dozens available.... Sounds like a good time to try out some white modeling spray paint to complete that model....

Thanks Antp... I will be making it "ALL 30" of the images. By "censuring" a few just because I don't care for them is really not fair... so I will be having a large poster size image with all 30 entrants to the contest!

In Britain/Ireland/Australia (via British LEGO Ltd.) and in USA/Canada (via Samsonite LEGO)... individual spare parts were never sold... but neither was the regular (9 different windows/1 door) 214 parts pack (well I take that back... in the early 1960s the mixed 214 pack WAS sold in Britain). So the 214 pack was mainly sold in Europe. Now that begs the question... how were LEGO spare windows/doors sold by British LEGO Ltd., and by Samsonite LEGO??? Well they sold each window type individually in a parts pack box. So you had 10 different parts pack boxes (214/1 thru 214/10) and in 2 colors... red and white... that made for 20 different spare parts pack boxes for windows/doors. Here is a 1963 Britain LEGO catalog... and it shows the classic windows/doors on the lower right side... and the number within parenthesese are the quantity of each that can be found in a British LEGO Ltd. spare parts pack... with the same windows or door count for the packs... with the same counts for Britain, Ireland and Australia... And here are the windows/doors parts counts for each of the USA Samsonite LEGO spare parts packs. These are much larger than the British LEGO boxes, and therefore contain more parts.... And here are the Samsonite of Canada LEGO windows/doors spare parts pack counts. These are a little bit less than the USA Samsonite ones... partly due to the disparity between the USA and Canadian dollars back in the early 1960s... So... as an example... the large 1x6x3 Panorama classic window spare parts pack 214/1... in Britain/Ireland/Australia, the parts pack box contains 4 large windows... for Canada the parts pack box contains 5 windows... and for the USA the parts pack box contains 6 windows. Images from 3 of my Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Collectors Guide (DVD/download) chapters... one on LEGO catalogs... one on LEGO windows/doors... and the other on LEGO spare parts packs. Gary Istok

The continental European retailer boxes for individual part sales were not used in all continental European LEGO countries. These were never used in Portugal, and were only used starting around 1962 or 1963 in Belgium or Switzerland. Elsewhere in continental Europe they were used starting in 1958 (1957 in Germany). Here is a 1961 German LEGO catalog... the LEGO windows/doors show as individual prices (from a retailer box) as well as a combined 10 piece (9 different windows & 1 door) spare parts pack box.... Here are the individual spare parts pack boxes (1950s style and 1960s style)...

Well 3 of the entries are pretty lame... actually in the image above I show one of the ones that I was going to omit... the one that looks like a white kitchen cabinet with a partition coming up out of the middle of it (one of the nicer models I accidentally omitted). And the 29th one was a circular white drum with some trans-clear bricks sticking out of one side. And the 30th one was really lame... a tall clear plexiglass outline of a dollhouse... with one of the attic rooms built out of LEGO. After mulling it over... I may add the missing 3 images (tall ones)... thereby making the total image more compatible with standard poster dimensions. I'll be giving it another once over.... and trying it out with all 30 images...

I just spent a few hours making a very high resolution (38MB) poster sized image of 27 of the 30 1985 Paris LEGO Architect Exhibition entries...

Thanks for the info on this Mike! A copy of this set went to German Ebay auction. I know the winner of that auction... my Belgian friend Stefaan... a great guy. This set really went for much less than I would have expected. Perhaps the rare version is not well known enough. But it was a TLG release this way... only TLG has no record of it... This set really is a sleeper... much rarer than the 62 Euros it was sold for!

Plauge.... those were the Cellulose Acetate windows/doors of the 1956-62 era... they didn't have as much clutch power, but once they were held in place with bricks, they were fine. But I can understand that someone growing up with LEGO in the 1980s would wonder what these odd windows and doors of the 1960s were all about. Interestingly enough the classic windows were finally discontinued by the 1980s... here's a rough estimate for their discontinuation... The 1x6x3, 1x6x2 (3 pane) and 1x6x2 (shutter) windows were discontinued by the late 1970s. The 1x2x3 classic door was discontinued by 1980. The 1x4x2, 1x3x2, 1x1x2, 1x2x1 and 1x1x1 windows were all discontinued in 1987... being part of a 1980s spare parts pack. The 1x2x2 window was produced until 2003... when the "glass gluing" machine broke down, and was sadly never replaced. Sigh... some of the rare and valuable LEGO items (windows/doors and other items) that Norway had, they would make me drool... That's an interesting question kivi.... I tend to believe that it was more a matter of fact that most European toy stores were small independent stores... and that the retailers sold individual windows and doors... so that when a European child in the late 1950s or 1960s wanted to add to his buildings.. he would take some pocket change and go to the toy store and buy a few windows or doors to expand his LEGO empire. This type of scenario just isn't done much anymore... since most toy stores are now big box or chain or department stores... and a child would not go off on his own in one of those...

Took me a while to get the new Flickr pages working... on my previous post... Flickr deep links no longer have the "user friendliness" that they once did! ... and as I mentioned in the original post... these retailer boxes brought me out of my Dark Ages back in 1979... I found a pair of these boxes (one dating to 1958-60 with white windows/doors, and one dating to 1961-65 with red windows/doors) in Germany at a stationary shop in a small town. They were sitting on a dusty shelf for over 15 years... waiting until I could buy them for DM40- each (about $20 each)... with a total of over 600 windows/doors. And I've been out of my Dark Ages ever since....

It was LEGO Pick-A-Brick that brought me out of my Dark Ages in 1979.... No, I'm not drinking... and yes... Pick-A-Brick was not available to LEGO collectors back before most of you were born!! But since Day 1 when LEGO sales first started in Denmark in 1949... Pick-A-Brick was available... but in a different way besides a wall at your regional LEGO store... Back from 1957-67 continental Europe (only) had a unique way to sell young LEGO builders LEGO windows and doors. This was thru a Pick-A-Brick of sorts... known as a LEGO Retailer Windows/Doors box under the number 214 1-10. This retailer box first appeared in Germany in late 1957... in a German language box.... Then in 1958 TLG started to offer the 214 1-10 retailer windows/doors boxes in retailers throughout continental Europe (Portugal never had these, and Switzerland and Belgium started in the early 1960s). The box top started having the "international" LEGO System on top... Then in 1961 a new box type was introduced with all the windows/door pictured on the box top (the inside was basically unchanged)... Then in 1966 a new windows/doors retailer box was introduced... the 461 box. This replaced the 214 1-10 box... but was only in production for 1 year (until 1967), when TLG decided to eliminate the entire windows/doors individual parts sales. Here's the shortlived 461 (virtually identical to the 1961-65 214 1-10 box)... These retailer windows/doors boxes were usually kept behind the counter at the continental European LEGO retailers. Often the retailers would have 2 boxes... one for red windows/doors, and one for white. Each box had 375 windows/doors.... 25 of each size of the larger windows... and 50 of each of the 2x2 windows, classic doors, and 3 smaller loose windows. In a 1960 German catalog... the price of a 375 part retailer box was DM 66- . Refills were possible in 2 ways... in an entire 375 part box refill known as 214S... and as individual window/door type refill... under the 214/1 thru 214/10 size. you just took out the old empty insert, which was actually the lower half of a retailer box refill type... and took the top off the new refill, and inserted into the retailer box... For the 1966 new 261 retailer box... the inserts had different numbers... 451-460... All of these retailer box images are from the collection of my Dutch LEGO friend Jeroen.... And these can be found in my Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Collectors Guide on DVD/download.

For those of you who were AFOLs back around the turn of the millenium, it's rather ironic how TLG for the longest time ignored the AFOL market. It wasn't until 2001 when LEGO Direct first started up (with Brad Justus), that AFOLs finally started getting respect from TLG. And of course that was around the time Bricklink came online as well to help with spare parts sales. One of the big bonus areas for Star Wars was the fact that crossover collectors (of other Star Wars products) came and bought LEGO sets to be part of their "collectible" genre.

Cellulose Acetate trans-clear bricks can usually be identified by a Champagne or ginger ale color to the bricks. Once TLG switched over to ABS plastic (a process that happened fairly quickly in Europe/Britain/Australia in 1963, but took nearly 7 years to complete in USA/Canada)... the trans-clear ABS bricks have a more bluish hue to them. You can usually tell a CA part (most are warped)... by doing the "wobble test" on a flat surface.... if a brick is placed (tubes down) on the surface, and it is warped... then usually it will wobble when weight is put onto different parts of the brick. Also... one of the reasons (although never been proven) that I believe that USA/Canada Samsonite LEGO took so long to switch over to ABS... was I believe that TLG shipped their leftover Cellulose Acetate plastic pellets to Samsonite to use up... this would help explain why red and especially yellow CA parts are so common in Samsonite LEGO sets until nearly 1970.

This is very true... because Norway and Sweden were producing parts back in the 1950s (when in addition to Denmark, those were the only LEGO countries until 1956)... and TLG was not aware of what they were producing... and therefore the TLG Archives are incomplete. However, I have several collectors who are scouring the secondary LEGO market of both Norway and Sweden, and the tally of colors are fast becoming known. So far 24 colors of bricks have been found (in sizes 2x2 and 2x4 only)... and the number of windows/doors is also a limited number of designs... so it shouldn't be too much longer before a pretty good stab at a final list of colors is known for windows/doors as well. I am very fortunate to have a group of collector friends who always report back about new finds!

Heat and humiidity are among the contributing factors. CA is not a stable plastic (like other Acetates)... and it can lose its' form over many years... although if you have a set that has been kept at climate controlled conditions, it will not warp. I have a 717 Junior Constructor Set (1961-65, USA/Canada Samsonite LEGO)... and the parts are still in new condition and have not warped. This set must have been kept under ideal conditions. By the late 1950s TLG knew that something was amiss with Cellulose Acetate... called "Cellidor" by the maker... Bayer Corp. of Germany. Continental European catalogs of that era mention that the parts should not be stored above 67 degrees Celcius, For white CA parts.... if they've been kept out of sunlight they really maintain their whiteness. This is unlike ABS white parts... which can still yellow, even if they've not seen sunlight.

Well in addition to the Vol. 2 DVD download (1990s-present), I'm also adding updates to the Vol. 1 DVD download (1949-1990s).... and those will be available (free) to current owners of the first DVD/download. Among those additions are LEGO windows/doors in orange from Sweden... and LEGO windows/doors in green, light green, sky blue and pink (!!)... from Norway. TLG Archives have no information on these early rarities... what went on in Norway and Sweden in the 1950s seems to have not been reported back to Denmark. Also adding hundreds of other rare images that collectors from around the world have sent to me... the more I get... the more are sent!! Both the current and future DVD downloads will have continuous updates that will be free to owners of the respective volumes. No reason to ever buy them again!

I hear you... they would make a very nice addition to any Townscape!! The only drawback would be if you wanted to use these in addition to the standard 32x32 stud roadplates. These are 50x50 studs... and not the 48x48 stud... wihich is more compatible with the 32x32 (four 48x48 = nine 32x32... in a road layout).

Sigh... just got wind of some very rare 1953-55 Norwegian LEGO windows/doors in colors no one has likely ever dreamed about.... sky blue, pink and light green!! Images pending...

And speaking of ENVY...... (And now that I've got some "Copying Flickr for Dummies Training on Forum Community..... ).... I can post more images... Here's some very rare 1:87 LEGO trucks.... this is a #652 Mercedes Truck/Trailer... but with the extremely rare Nivea (skin lotion company) decals. These may have been just prototypes never put into production, since this is the only known pair... value... too hard to determine... but in the thousands.... $$$$$$ Here's a very rare pair of vehicles.... the "Leche Danny Leite" #257 Bedford Delivery Truck (circa 1963) is a TLG promotional truck that was sold a few years ago from the LEGO Collections... and is a prototype worth many thousands. On the other side of this truck is the English/French caption "Mik DANNY Lait". Danny was a continental European dairy company, and this prototype delivery truck was never actually produced for sale, but only as a prototype. The #258 VW Van also dates to circa 1963... and SPAR is a European grocery company. However, this van was not found in the company archives... but in used condition. This may have been a protoytpe as well, since no other specimens are known... one that got out of the factory and into circulation. Again a very valuable item... worth $$$ in good condition. The number of these rare vans and truck varieties numbers over 2 dozen. If you had a collection of all of them... it would likely be worth at least $50K. Now where's my green with envy Emoticon?? Thanks to collectors from all around the world, I am able to show all of these very rare and highly desireable cars/trucks in my Unnoficial LEGO Sets/Parts Collectors Guide. I always enjoy showning the folks at the LEGO Archives/Collections cars/trucks that they have no record of....

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the help from you folks... especially the "Flickr for Dummies" deep links.....