Lost in Translation

This has been another not-great week, and I will be grateful when it ends. (Without injury, I hope. No guarantee there, unfortunately.) 

I am currently self-medicating with an extremely elaborate quilt piecing project, art restoration videos, and homemade pound cake.

Let’s focus on some positives. First, the pound cake was a new recipe, and freaking delicious. And second, the latest Vintage Club release has been revealed – a Gambler’s Choice Silver, named Thunderbird!

Boy, that guy was a hard secret to keep under wraps. He looks awesome in all four colors; it appears that the Appaloosa is the online crowd’s clear favorite, but I will be happy with whatever one I comes my way. 

(And he’ll definitely cheaper than trying to buy something like a Goldfinch on the secondary!)

I also managed to secure a spare couple of hours of free time earlier this week, and used that opportunity to sort through some e-mails and ephemera, which wasn’t quite as big a mess as I thought it would be. (But yikes, I’ve got some gaps to fill.)  

It also reminded me that I needed to show you guys my other big Ephemera find at BreyerFest this year: 

Breyer got a lot of mail from its fans in the 1970s and early 1980s, to the point where they had to generate in-house materials to deal with it. There was a preprinted postcard that acknowledged your suggestions for future models, that infamous (and somewhat inaccurate) historical list of Breyer releases, and – news to me! – a short history of Breyer (above), and an explainer on how models were made (below):

There’s nothing new or revelatory here, but the wording on the history page is both more clear, and more nuanced than the initial history I heard bandied about it my early days in the hobby. The game of telephone did it no favors! 

The ways information get conveyed, interpreted and distorted haven’t improved much in the decades since, but that’s more of a statement about human nature than of the hobby itself.