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Showing results for tags 'LEGO Mursten'.
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I have a good Dutch LEGO friend named Richard Bintanja. A while ago he got a very old LEGO set from the mid 1950s. He got it for a good price, but wasn't at all sure that all the parts in the set were original. Here's the box top... the LEGO Mursten... Mursten = Bricks in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. This 700/1 basic set was sold in only these 3 countries from 1953-55 (only starting in 1955 for Sweden). These early LEGO sets had the bricks nicely displayed in a lower box in a checkerboard pattern, with a cellophane shrink wrap cover holding them in place. But once the shrink wrap was gone... mayhem took over... and the original set layout was often lost forever... Here we see in this circa 1954 700/1 basic set... the LEGO mayhem in full bloom!.... The windows/doors on these old LEGO Mursten sets were of 2 types... the oldest flat windows/doors that were produced from 1949-56 of the Automatic Binding Bricks type... and the 1954-56 tall classic windows/doors with "glass". These nice windows did not have studs on top... but had "wings" on the sides that fit into the slotted bricks to stay in place. For a 1 year period (throughout 1954) these 2 window/door types were found in basic sets simultaneously. As I said, Richard wasn't sure if these parts were original to this set, several collectors said no... but I said.... not so fast... let's see how they fit inside the box.... and try "checkerboarding" the bricks... So then this was what he came up with.... I said... well..... it looks like you got the wrong parts in the wrong partitions... try putting the bricks into the smallest partitions........ This seemed to have been the ideal location of the bricks, although a 1x2 blue and 2x2 yellow brick appear to be missing, and were later added. I mentioned that he should change the location of the baseplate and windows/door to the middle, and integrate the yellow/red bricks into the checkerboard layout... Well there's a saying in English that fits here... "it's what I asked for... but not what I want"... So I sent him a diagram of how to incorporate all of the colors into a checkerboard layout... and this is what came about.... Well this was the final redesign... and it got a lot of WOWs... from friends and skeptic's alike... In fact he even got offers to buy this now-determined-to-be-original set, for at least twice what he initially payed for this. This checkerboard layout was how this set likely looked when it was brand new, and restoring it to its' original state shows off some of the "poetry" of how early LEGO looked in its original packed state. Most of the 1949-65 LEGO basic sets were packed in this checkerboard design... but few came out looking so nicely, as seen in these colors!! In chapters 2 and 5 of my Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Collectors Guide, I show how these sets were originally packed, often showing old LEGO Retailer catalog images with this multicolor packing technique. Poetry in LEGO.... Gary Istok P.S. These early LEGO sets had "art cards"... cards that would fit into the slots on the sides of these early LEGO slotted bricks. You could easily build a LEGO picture frame with these!
