Vanilla is Good, Too

That’s all I’m saying about today: that box of Reissues can’t arrive soon enough. I’m so opening all the boxes and going full carpet herd with them.

Anyway, happier thoughts. Like the latest in what appears to be an unending stream of Store Specials - Novelisto D!

It’s yet another variation of the Brishen Multi-Mold, with the original Brishen mane and tail, but the Laredo legs.

And I like him. The front legs still give off that "Barbie Horse" vibe, but the combination of the various parts, with the plain - yet elegant - glossy White/Alabaster paint job is wonderful. It appears that I’m not the only one who thinks so. He seems to have jumped (or flown?) onto a lot of hobbyists’ To-Buy lists, too.

We haven’t seen many plain, unfancified White or Alabaster paint jobs in recent years; most Aged Gray or White models nowadays have some embellishment to them. They’re Chalkied, Pearled, Dappled, Shaded, or some combination thereof.

Some of them have been quite beautiful; the BreyerFest Pecos and the Gladwin Lucky Lady are both big favorites in my barn.

But sometimes, plain old vanilla is good too. The first "Vintage" model I ever saw - one that I hadn’t seen in a store or in a catalog - was a Matte Alabaster Family Arabian Stallion. A classmate on the bus took one to school one day, and I was entranced. Shortly afterwards we struck up a conversation, and many entertaining lunch room conferences were had, often spend ogling over the latest Breyer Collector’s Manual.

She and her friend even showed their models, which blew my mind and led me to finally subscribe to Just About Horses, which led me … here. So I guess it shouldn’t shock that I have about a half dozen variations of that model now: Gloss, to Matte, to Special Run. It wasn’t intentional, not at first.

Novelisto D is the horse that played the part of Athansor, a mystical, time-traveling flying horse in the recent film adaptation of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale.

I read the novel not long after it came out - because it was a fantasy novel with a horse in it, duh! While I was impressed with the beauty of the language and the scope of the story, the novel I read shortly after - John Crowley’s Little, Big - had a much bigger impact on me, emotionally and artistically. Even if it did have fewer flying horses in it.

The Winter’s Tale film came and went, which is what I expected to happen; it’s not the kind of book that’s easily adaptable to a compact two-hour theatrical release. Genre fantasy is a tough sell cinematically, but literary fantasy even moreso. Because of my schedule, I didn’t get a chance to see the film in its brief theatrical run, but I’ll be more than happy to add the horse to my herd in the meantime.