Collectors’ Corner

Joustra’s name comes from Jouets de Strasbourg. The company was founded in the Neudorf district in 1934 by the Kosmann brothers, according to the Musée du Kochersberg’s account of its Joustra exhibition. The museum arranged the toys partly by the ways they moved: a display traced materials and mechanisms from 1934 to 1982, while another grouped inexpensive friction-driven figures. Aircraft and helicopters hung above the cases. One particularly curious pairing…

The familiar Lehmann mark is a stylised screw press. Brandenburg’s city museum dates its introduction as the company’s identifying symbol to 1888, with revised versions appearing in later years. The connection to metalworking is more than decorative. Ernst Paul Lehmann’s first patented invention was an industrial sheet-metal container with a special closure. The museum records that proceeds from this invention supplied the starting capital for his toy factory, founded with…

According to The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame, Joshua Lionel Cowen’s first electric train was intended as a shop-window attraction around 1900. Customers wanted to buy the little train rather than the goods it was helping to advertise. That account places the beginning of Lionel in a shop window, before the great layouts and Christmas advertising associated with the name. The company went on to make three-rail train sets…

Friedrich Peltzer appreciated people collecting his models, but was less enthusiastic about the prices some collectors put on them. Wiking’s own history describes his repeated insistence that the models should be available to everyone. In 1978, responding to collectors’ requests, he issued a folder of reprinted brochures and a chronological list of new traffic models. He supported documenting the range. What troubled him about the collectors’ “yellow catalogue” was its…

Eheim’s route from toys to aquariums ran through a miniature fountain. According to the company’s history, its 1962 centrifugal pump with magnetic coupling was originally developed to make a model fountain work realistically. The small pump found uses beyond toys, including medical and laboratory equipment. Combining it with a cleaning container led to Eheim’s aquarium suction filter, and the first filter system entered series production in 1963. Eheim had begun…

Steiff’s story began with something made for a sewing table. In 1880, Margarete Steiff followed a fashion-journal pattern to sew a small felt elephant intended as a pincushion. Children adopted it as a toy. The company’s early range soon included other felt animals: donkeys, horses, camels, pigs, mice and giraffes. Richard Steiff’s jointed plush bear belonged to a later chapter, in 1902. The elephant also appeared on the original button-in-ear…

Long before Gundam kits, Bandai was selling the idea of a toy backed by a guarantee. Its company history dates the launch of a product-guarantee system to November 1955, alongside a model of the 1956 Toyopet Crown. The initials BC came from Bandai Company. By 1958, the message had reached television: the red box identified a BC-guaranteed toy. Quality was being made part of the brand’s public identity, rather than…