Rare Enough

Sorry guys – for some strange reason I did a little poking around the family tree just for fun, and now I appear to be knee deep in some serious genealogy research. With all the business I have to catch up on in the next several weeks, it’s not something I thought I needed to do, but here I am doing it anyway…

But I have held you all in suspense long enough with this package that arrived a couple of weeks ago already, so here it is:

A little background information: this all happened the same day that the Starry Skies Stablemates dropped on the Breyer web site. As I said before, I was a bit hesitant to buy more Blind Bag Stablemates, so I wandered over to eBay to clear my head a bit.

Aside from the fact that there were a couple of sweaters on there I was eyeing, I was also poking around on eBay because I had missed several good model horse auctions over the past several weeks previous as a consequence of my still-ongoing scheduling issues.

Perhaps lightning would finally strike for me, right?

Then, it actually happened.

I saw an honest-to-goodness Grail Model.

It had just been listed.

The seller was accepting offers.

So I made an offer.

It definitely wasn’t the price you still may see on eBay, but it was what I thought was (a) reasonable, and (b) within my budget.

I wasn’t expecting to offer to be accepted. Surely others had also seen it, and it’s something that’s on a lot of collector must-have lists. Even if I didn’t get it in the end, I figured I made an honest effort, at least.

An hour later, my offer was accepted.

I didn’t believe she was actually mine until the package arrived about a week later:

Yes, a Showcase Collection #1430 Palomino Grazing Mare!

Showcase Collection packaging (ca. 1970-1972) was one of the few examples of early Breyer packaging I had not acquired yet. Because of its fragility, it has been described as one of the “rarest” types of early packaging, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. Dumbbell stickers and the original Touchability Boxes are almost equally fragile, and far more scarce.

What the Showcase Collection packaging has got going for it is desirability: it’s just rare enough that even average collectors can reasonably dream of eventually adding one their own collection. And there are just enough of them turning up on a yearly basis to encourage others to dedicate themselves to actually collecting them as a thing, the same way some of us collect Chalkies, Stablemates, or color variations.

As you know by now, I am more of the former, not the latter. Though if I were lucky enough to find another, I certainly wouldn’t pass him or her by…