Pressman

(As an art historian and Francophile, today has been a very bad day. Since I have things I really need to get done this week, I am going to put my feelings about what happened in Paris today in a little box and take them out when I have time to grieve and reflect. 

Sometime after the show on Saturday, I presume.

On with today’s show…)  

The topic of Pressman horses came up recently, and I thought it was worth posting on the blog, since information about them in the great wilds of the Internet is pretty scarce.

Pressman was – and remains! – an established toy company that’s still in business. Though primarily known for their board games (they were the ones who helped popularize Chinese Checkers in the U.S.) they’ve made all sorts of toys over the years, including a brief foray into the world of model horses.

Here’s a page from the 1965 Montgomery Ward’s Christmas Catalog, featuring their exclusive release of Pressman’s “Horsey Set”, including the Hunting Horse (a knock-off of the Stretched Morgan), the Western Cowpony (an amalgamation of the Fighting Stallion and Mustang) and the Thoroughbred Racer (kinda-sorta a Running Mare):

Like Breyer before them, Pressman broke into the market by copying the designs of other companies – here obviously, Breyer!

There were a number of toy companies that tried to cash in on the toy horse “craze” in the 1950s and 1960s, but Pressman was one of the few to put some serious effort into it. This was probably because they were a toy company that had been around since 1922: they could afford to take a few risks. This is also why they dropped it when the model horse market dropped off in the late 1960s – they already had other, more profitable things to sell.

There’s currently a Pressman stable for sale on eBay, and what’s interesting about the box is that it specifically calls out the existence of the “new fascinating hobby” itself!

Although Breyer, Hartland and the rest did actively promote model horses as collectibles from the get-go, it was hobbyists like ourselves that came up with everything else that makes up what we call “the model horse hobby”: showing, customizing, pedigree assignments, racing and all that other stuff.

However, this is one of the things that gets glossed over in hobby histories: the toy industry took note of our efforts (and via our letters, undoubtedly), and made the effort to push to promote the hobby as well.

And why not? There was money to be made!

There were some favorable articles about the hobby as early as 1959 (in Western Horseman) and Mission Supply House actually published a professional-looking hobby newsletter ca. 1965-1967.

Breyer eventually got into the hobby promotion game in 1968, with the publication of the first “Collector’s Manuals”. But they didn’t specifically mention the hobby by name until the 1970 Manual: