Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Best building blocks

Anchor Stones are either still made or being made again. I'm putting these links in and then I'll read up later. These were the very best things! They were obviously from before the Great War, and probably from the 1890s. They had been cared for perfectly; not a one was missing; they were packed into the wooden box according to the diagram on the cover. A small ad in The New Yorker touting a site selling construction toys (the business is called The Construction Site; the url is constructiontoys.com) made me wonder about these blocks. They feel so beautiful in the hand, and there's something about the colors, too. It turns out that the on-line store sells several different Anchor sets, apparently packaged just like the original ones. They aren't cheap now, and I bet they weren't ever cheap in the first place, judging from how well they'd been cared for. I always liked the idea of Lincoln Logs better than the logs themselves, perhaps because they're so big and clumsy. I used to play with somebody else's toy brick set. As I recall, the designs were very suburban and ranchy, but the plastic casement windows that worked were neat. These blocks may first have been of wood and then of plastic. I'm virtually certain that the brand was American Bricks, and that the sets are probably from the late 1940s and early to middle 1950s (the ones I knew were plastic; others know the wooden ones). In a side excursion, I learn that the A. C. Gilbert company (Erector sets and chemistry sets) was once the largest toy manufacturer in the world. I'm considering acquiring a set of Anchor blocks of my own. What person of any age who loves building toys wouldn't love these?

2 Comments:

At 11:18 AM, December 15, 2011, Anonymous Best Survey sites said...

This is great building blocks

 
At 7:53 AM, December 16, 2011, Anonymous What Is Debt Consolidation said...

I like these building blocks.

 

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