Insert Sheets, Pt. II

If I come across as a bit of a cranky-puss today, I apologize. My work schedule was completely, utterly messed up this week; I ended up driving about twice as far as anyone else, for about half the hours. Listening to other people complain about all the overtime they’re getting gets very old, very quickly.

I am still Esprit-free. This is not really a surprise - I know how the hobbyists are around here - but it did irritate me more than I thought it would.

I think there’s just something fundamentally flawed about the way this mold’s been marketed. Restricting availability to a new item does drive up demand; overdo it, and it becomes a deterrent. I’ll have at least one in my collection eventually - the BreyerFest Pecos - but that may well and truly be it.

In other words, there’s no need for anyone to go out of their way to get me one. If I find one eventually, at a price I can afford, awesome. If not, no big whoop.

Back to the Insert Sheets discussion. First, here are some scans of the little seen 1964 Inserts:




I really like the way these pages are designed; if I had the money-time-inclination, I’d have them blown up to one-sheet poster size and frame them for my office. (Note to the folks at Reeves, if you’re reading: you might want to look into this idea. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’d be into that sort of thing.)

You’ll note that unlike the 1963 Dealer’s Catalog, these sheets are not full-color. The 1963 Catalog was a bit of an outlier; most of Breyer’s marketing materials prior to the late 1960s were not printed in full-color. It wasn’t purely an aesthetic choice: full-color printing was expensive. If they could get away with printing something in a duotone, or with a spot color or two, they would.

A restricted color palette isn’t that big a deal, as long as the materials themselves are designed and rendered well. And for the most part, they were, but that’s another topic I haven’t even begun to research yet. (I met Richard Lewis once, in passing, about 10-12 years ago. Another one of those "wish I had a time machine for a do-over" moments.)

As far as I know, the 1962 Insert Sheets haven’t shown up - yet. Now there’s something I’d pay an almost-crazy amount of money for. It’s possible they may not even exist, but we didn’t know the 1961 Sheets existed, until they resurfaced.

We’ve got a good idea of which molds those sheets might feature - the Running Mare and Foal, the Western Prancing Horse, and maybe the Texas Longhorn Bull - but having those sheets would prove it, definitively. I’d be fine with finding that information via other routes, but the sheets themselves would be sweet.