Bernadette

I am so pleased with the reaction to the latest Vintage Club release, Bernadette:

I know a lot of people were wondering when she’d show up as a Vintage Club release, and when I found out, well… let’s just she was another tough secret to keep!

The Bell-bottomed Shire is one of the few Breyer molds that I might be able to complete my collection of; I bough the Riegesecker Shires when they came out, and managed to buy most of the rest at my leisure.

The only tough one will be the Chasing the Chesapeake Testudo, and that’s because I made an executive decision to go with the Chestnut Fell Pony Emma instead.

(The Chalky Sorrel and the Glossy Dapple Gray are sufficiently out of reach that I am not even going to consider them a part of my list. Sort of the way I ignore the Presentation Series Man o’ War, until/if/when it happens.)

Vintage Test Colors of the Shire are relatively uncommon, mostly because I don’t think they had a lot extras bodies floating around the factory in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Marney was painting most of them up. The mold was discontinued in the mid- to late 1970s in the first place because she was a bit of a resource hog: those tree-stump-thick legs take a lot of plastic to mold!

And she kept coming back because… of collectors like me, who kind of love her in a low-key way. It’s helpful that she’s a relatively easy mold to collect – though it’s probably a bit ironic that she’s being honored with a Vintage Club Gambler’s Choice release that makes her somewhat less so.

I really don’t care which one I get, though I think Golden Charm one is my favorite; Wedgewood Blue used to be my favorite of the original four Decorator colors, but lately Golden Charm’s been more my thing.

(Though I would be happy with finding any Decorator in any condition in the wild.)

Incidentally, it is “Golden Charm”, not Gold Charm, per the original price lists from 1964. Actually, it’s kind of interesting to examine the original Decorator price list to see that the hobby is basically using three of the four color terms incorrectly: it’s Florentine, not “Gold Florentine” and Copenhagen, not “Copenhagen Blue”:

 

This I attribute to the fact that the original Decorator price list didn’t get as much circulation as other Breyer ephemera from the same era, and when it finally did, the hobby usage of the terms had become so ingrained that the correct terminology doesn’t register.

(And even I slip up, a lot of the time.)