More Additions to the Reference Shelf

Here’s an unusual and unexpected addition I made to my Marguerite Henry First Edition collection. Though, as you will plainly see, I rather doubt they’ll ever be making a model or gift set out of this one:

There are no horses in Geraldine Belinda, just a selfish little girl who learns how to share. It’s from 1942, a few years before Henry wrote Justin Morgan Had a Horse.

I found it while poking around a dollar table at the local flea market; I only happened to pick it up because my mother’s name is Geraldine. She’s never been fond of it, but I thought it might cheer her up a bit to know that her name was at one time considered pretty enough to grace the cover of a children’s book.

(And who knows? Maybe that’s really where Grandma Jankowiak got the name. It’s from the same time period. Though Mom’s middle name is actually Virginia, not Belinda.)

Another fun addition to the library was this hobby catalog from 1959/60. I was really excited when I found it, since it falls within that largely undocumented period of Breyer History. It’s an engrossing read but alas, animals of any kind are scarce within.

Horses are rather complicated creatures, anatomically, and not easy to “make right” even as preassembled pieces. Most kit horses that do turn up (that aren’t “The Visible Horse”) are usually a part of Western-themed or historical kits. Throughout the 1960s, however, both Aurora and Revell came out with a small line of 1/8 horse kits:

http://www.oldmodelkits.com/index.php?detail=13160&page=1
http://www.oldmodelkits.com/index.php?detail=9581&page=71

(Breyer had the license for Fury through 1966, so Aurora’s kit was clearly not considered direct competition.)

I’ve always wanted to find just one of these kits – assembled or otherwise – for my collection, but this is a fairly big area for modellers, and vintage kits of any kind tend to be scarce and/or expensive.

Breyer didn’t start making kits of their own until the 1970s, and of accessories, not the horses themselves. But I’ll take about that some other time.