Jumping In

Before we go any further, here's a slight update to the post previous - a picture of some of those righteous ladies in the painting department, back when. The man on the right is Manuel Valdez, Breyer’s painting supervisor, whose name is sometimes mentioned when higher quality Chicago-era Test Colors turn up:

I used to wonder if, in all my years of horsetrading, I ever had one of those Clydesdale Mares or Rearing Stallions in my possession. I now look at this photo and think one of these people might have been responsible/instigated the shenanigans that led to the Crazy Zebra Painting Party.

The weekend made up for the week preceding, somewhat. Found this gigantic fellow at the town garage sale on Saturday, for instance:

An almost life-sized Red Mill Bulldog! He’s not for sale, but his Five-Gaiter buddy and a big box of recent Stablemates will be. (You can’t see it in the photo, but the Gaiter’s got some nice eyewhites on him!) I also found a big bag of vintage glitter. I don’t know what the heck I’m going to do with it all, though I suspect a Family Arabian Mare may be involved at some point.

I feel bad for neglecting to mention that the next round of auctions at Munda’s was up on Friday, and the second part of the Indiana auctions, too. Too wrapped up in my own crazy business, I guess. From the prices that were realized for some of the items, though, I don’t think they necessarily needed any help from me.

I did find the prices reported for some of the pieces in the Indiana auction a little troubling - much higher than the prices realized for similar pieces in other venues. This is good for the estate, of course, but it makes me sort of glad that I’m more of a Vintage collector than a Contemporary one. (Most of the items in the Indiana sale were Connoisseurs and other more recent releases).

I’d rather spend $300 on a Gloss Dapple Gray Belgian than $3000 on the latest-newest-hottest thing. The volatility of the newer-model market bothers me enough that I tend to shy away from it in practice: if I can’t buy it at or around issue price, I probably won’t buy it at all.

I won’t say never, because there are always exceptions. (Hello there, my beautiful WEG Man o’ War!) The Vintage market isn’t immune either, as the recent crazes for Chalkies and Five-Gaiter Sorrel Family Arabians demonstrate.

But I like the thrill - and unpredictability - of the hunt. Having a set shopping list and applying money directly to it has never been my style, model horses or otherwise. (Yeah, I’m loads of fun in a grocery store, too. Ooh, are those turnips on the clearance rack?)

Actually, the prices I’ve been seeing lately - at auction, on eBay, on MH$P and all that - make me wonder if we’re entering into another "speculator’s" market. Again, I’m mostly insulated from that because of the kinds of models I buy and sell. I am extremely reluctant to sell anything I really like anyway, no matter the prices they start commanding. Sometimes it makes me want just want them even more. What if the price goes up, and stays up? Cheapskate me may never have the opportunity to own another.

I have to admit that I am tempted to jump in, especially since I have some pricey things I need to pay for in the next few months - real life things, not model horse things. A new car is foremost, but there’s also some minor surgery that needs to be done that's likely not covered by my insurance.

What I’m trying to say is that I am seriously contemplating selling that adorable Gray Appaloosa Classic Quarter Horse Foal I showed you a couple weeks back. I haven’t decided on the venue. I’m thinking BreyerFest is going to be the way to go, since he has some condition issues that are best seen in person.

I’ll also have a selection of ephemera for sale, from my recent acquisitions. The problem with those items is that many of them have never been on the market before, especially with provenance, so pricing is the biggest issue there.

When the time comes, I’ll toss a preview ad up on MH$P with the necessary details.

Just Gotta Laugh Sometimes

(Before we begin the festivities here, it has been brought to my attention that the Youth Show prizes are going to be Glossy after all, thus rendering all the commentary about the switch to Semigloss moot. I can only hope that Reeves has been eavesdropping on the various forum discussions about the matter.)

Several days of epic awfulness was capped with me losing my car keys - inside my car. No, no joke. I drove from one job location to another, parked and waited for the supervisor to show up, took the keys out of the ignition, set them down to gather up all my other stuff, and when I got ready to get out of the car, I couldn’t find them.

I had not even opened the door at that point.

Coworkers completed two (two!) epic searches where we essentially tossed the car, but nope, no keys anywhere. Fortunately, I had an emergency key in my wallet, so I was able to get home without having to make a really embarrassing phone call.

But it still made me wonder who or what I could have ticked off in the past week. I’m not one to believe in gypsy curses, but you can make a rough guess at the kind of Google searches I was running last night.

On the plus side, I did get some nice things in the mail today, including a very entertaining batch of old hobby ephemera, a lovely time capsule of my own "golden age" of the hobby, roughly 30 or so years ago. Back when "pix" like this were state-of-the-art for photo showing purposes:

Soup Can Racing!

Still Life with Dead Cow!

Extraterrestrial Performance!

Nope. Not Going There.

And for the history portion of our program today, the kind of epic Culls/Tests/Oddities that we fought epic battles over:

Three Margarita Lunch Day at Breyer Plant!

Lest you are harboring any unkind thoughts, the person who sent this stuff to me is probably looking at all this and laughing right along with you. These photos (except for the Classic Andalusian Mare) aren’t any different, really, than photographs I or anyone else took back then. In fact, as I was doing a quick search through them this afternoon, I kept remarking "Yep, took one just like that, and that, and that…" 

This is photographic evidence of what the hobby looked like. And you know what? Looks like we had a pretty darn good time, in spite of our lack of technical or artistic sophistication.

(Speaking of: for dignity’s sake, I decided to forego all pictures where actual people were shown, because Mullets.)

(You’re welcome.)

Semigloss

Just a head’s up: I am not a happy camper today. Aside from having to deal with the kind of people who make one think wistfully of giant meteors hitting the Earth, the computer just crashed and blowed up my latest post before I had a chance to even save it.

(Long story. I blame the dog.)

Anyway, I just came back from being outside: the flowers are blooming, and there’s a nest of baby Robins in the garden. I had a good hair day, and I found a bunch of good chocolate on clearance at the store this morning. I saw some not-outrageously-priced Breyers at the Antique Mall today, and one of them was a Chalky!

Dang. Happy thoughts not working like I hoped. Oh well, moving on. If you catch a whiff of anything iffy, it's me, not you.

One somewhat positive development, it appears that this year’s BreyerFest Youth Show prizes are going to be Semigloss, rather than Gloss, whatever that means. (More on that in a minute.)

This is a good thing, because all those Gloss Prize models were doing was ramping up the intensity level on a show that should be, essentially, a fun learning experience.

Cheating’s been going on a while, but it looks like last year finally drove Reeves to do something a little more meaningful than including even sterner warnings about unsportsmanlike behavior in the show packet.

It’s funny, I was just looking over some ephemera I acquired recently and it included a bunch of show results from the early 1980s. We had show prizes back then, too, but they tended to be relegated to raffles, silent auctions, and door prizes. It was more about the ribbons, the rosettes and the prestige. My Bay Trakehner won a Reserve Grand at Model Horse Congress in the Senior Division back then. All I got was a big rosette, but that was a HUGE deal to me!

Cheating went on back then, too. Get a bunch of horse-crazy young ladies in a room competing for who has the best/prettiest horses, and there’s going to be drama. And felt tip markers. And people with X-acto blades who aren’t happy about your minty-mint Buckskin Indian Pony with the blue ribbon sticker keeps beating their horses, and is going to do something about that.

Aside from the lack of prize models, one other difference back then was that there was another division, composed of non-adult Novices who were no longer Novices, but didn’t feel they were ready to compete with the adults yet. The "Junior" division was never big, numerically, mostly because people aged out of it. (Novices, on the other hand, could be any age.) Moving on towards the Senior/Open divisions was considered a "step up" in terms of prestige, too.

Switching to slightly less impressive prizes for the Youth Show will, I hope, revive the notion that "stepping up" is a good thing, especially among those Youth showers who are more like the Junior showers of yesteryear. That it requires a little "financial" encouragement isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either, as long as it achieves the desired effect.

Anyway, back to the "Semigloss" thing: no one’s quite sure, yet, what Reeves’s definition of that word is going to be. Heck, even in the hobby we can’t agree on what "Semigloss" means: I’ve seen it used to describe models that were very slightly satiny, to models whose Gloss wasn’t quite as thick as the old-fashioned 1960s "dip glossed" models. It’s an extremely variable - and relative - term.

I tend to fall into the "relativity" camp: in other words, how different is it from the standard/contemporary finishes? Many early Matte-finished models from the 1960s appear to be Semigloss compared to the Matte-finished of today, but are quite obviously Matte compared to the other releases of the time.

While it's a bit of a sticking point for me, who likes simple and neat definitions for things, the point is moot if you’re a variation collector. All that matters there is (a) do you like it? and (b) do you like it enough to buy it? As someone who has just a few too many horses in the barn right now, the variation has to be really distinctive and/or really special to come through my front door.

I just can’t ever see myself being one of those one-mold-only collectors, where going hog wild over ever shade and variant could be a legitimate collection focus. I love the Traditional Man o’ War. But I love the old Trakehner, too. And the Pacer. And the G1 Stablemates. And the Western Prancing Horse, and - you get the idea.

UPDATE 6/5: Well, the baby birds fell out of the nest today...and there was nothing we could do to save them. I will now spend the rest of the day in the basement waiting for the meteor and eating chocolate until I am sick.

Radioactive

I made the mistake of going on the Breyer web site forums the other night. Now I remember why I avoid that place like the plague.

Look, I think that Reeves should use multiple means of distributing models to us. Some of us like the rush we get from a Black Friday-style sale, and others simply want to place their order and walk away, with minimal drama.

The solutions of letting people know what "mystery" models are for sale, and boosting the piece counts to some ridiculously high number - very popular ideas in the Breyer web site forums - completely miss the point of this kind of sale. The mystery and the rarity are the source of the excitement. Taking them away would be like taking the scary bits out of a horror movie.

If everything went to a lottery/raffle system, I would probably lose complete interest after a while. I like a little mystery and excitement. I find Breyer History fun to research because of all the mysteries, that some of them may never truly be knowable - and the excitement when I find out that it is.

And let’s face facts: raffles/lotteries not necessarily any more fair than any other means of distribution. Some people are naturally more lucky than others and that, pardon my French, kinda sucks. We all know people who seem to win every single contest they enter - and people who have never won anything at all, ever. After not winning ten or twenty times in a row, you’re going to be disinclined to consider the system "fair".

Even if it is only an illusion, some of us also like the sense that skill and knowledge play a part in our collecting efforts. Nothing cheeses me off more than the insistence, in some quarters of the hobby, that collecting is a passive activity. Not the way I - or a lot of my friends - do it!

Allegedly the overselling part of the equation that plagued the last sale of this kind was remedied, but it appears that the solution may have been the cause of the premature sell-out notification. (I’m not privy to the inner workings of that particular system, but I’ve seen similar issues with other inventory systems before.)

In other words, it was a classic "fixing one problem creates another" issue.

I’m not trying to be a suck up here, because anyone who knows me knows some of the [road apples] I’ve had to put up with dealing with Reeves in the past. This wasn’t a malicious or callous act of greed. The only thing they’re truly guilty of is underestimating us.

Again and again, it’s true, but we’re always upping the ante ourselves, aren’t we?

Let us speak no more of this affair again. I’m not even going to say anything here if one really and truly shows up on my doorstep. If I need money badly enough, I’m going to sell other, less radioactive things first.

I’m going to be home - and online, mostly - through most of the weekend, trying to catch up on some long-overdue paperwork and e-mails, so this might be a good time to ask me any questions, if you got ‘em.

Spring Cleaning: Getting the Funk Out

Honestly, I have no idea if I got one of the Mother Lode models listed on the Breyer web site tonight. Like everyone else I spent 10 minutes trying to log on, and then having it taken out of my order queue when I went to pay.

Then they reappeared again, about an hour later, and my order allegedly went through. I figured that the worst that could happen is a cancellation phone call or e-mail from Reeves, right?

Look, I can accept not getting a super-limited model. I’ve been really lucky the past couple of years, with the Glossy War Horse, the White Moose, the Buried Treasure Lusitano, and the first Vault Sale. So missing out on a pretty gold Lady Phase would be no biggie. (My favorite was the Gold Buckskin! The "common" one of the three, allegedly.)

It’s the waiting that kills. If I’m going to be disappointed, I want the pain and suffering over with quickly, like pulling a Band Aid off. That’s all I’m asking.

Moving on…

I had an interesting experience with a piece of vintage fabric over the weekend. I wanted to give it a quick rinse or two to get the flea market "funk" out of it, but it turned into a two-day-long ordeal to vanquish the "Old Lady’s Ashtray" smell emanating from the washtub. I’ve had stinky fabric before, but this so bad I was having flashbacks to a particularly odoriferous family road trip in 1979.

(Four chain-smoking adults in a GMC Jimmy with the windows rolled up most of the time because of the rain. Good times!)

"Destinkifying" is a topic that comes up with regular frequency in my e-mails, and since flea market season is in full swing, it’s probably a good time to bring it up here again, for reference.

The Cellulose Acetate that Breyers are made of is semi-synthetic, and semi-permeable. In other words, it can absorb stuff it comes into contact with: water, grease, oil, cigarette smoke, perfume, and all manner of airborne pollutants.

Cigarette smoke is among the worst: not only does it make the model smell bad, the nicotine from the smoke also makes the plastic look dingy - and in more extreme cases, darkly yellowed.

The first step should be a basic cleaning: dunking and soaking in very warm water with a good amount of high quality dish soap. Dawn seems to be the brand of choice among most hobbyists, but if some other brand works well for you, it should work for your horses, too.

This should get the top layer of grime off, and unyellow the model slightly by consequence. I wouldn’t recommend a dunk any longer than overnight, because the model will start to absorb the water as well, possibly lifting the finish. (Glossies are especially prone to this!)

Naturally, this is not an ideal solution for any model with labels or stickers. And surprisingly, anything with metallic paint - either as tack trim, or as the base body color. If you’ve ever had any experience with vintage Decorators, you know that the gold paint that Breyer has used in the past has been of variable permanence: it fades, it tarnishes, it corrodes.

It’s not that those models can’t be cleaned or unyellowed, but they should be done with extreme caution.

Squirt bottles are a useful tool for those models that can’t or shouldn’t be dunked. Mix up a solution of warm water and a little bit of dish soap, and set to stream. Spray and blot quickly, as necessary; a cotton swab comes in handy for the nooks and crannies of the mane and tail. But again, be gentle: there are some finishes that are prone to rubbing (Alabasters and Dapple Grays), and the less pressure you put on their finishes, the better.

Once the initial cleaning is done - by dunking, or by spray bottling - put the model in a sunny window with cool exposure: this should dissipate the remaining odor after a couple of days. If not, either repeat the procedure, or take the cleaning process to the next step: baking soda.

Sprinkle the model liberally with baking soda and seal it in a plastic bag, preferably with the rest of the box, and let it set for several days. Periodically pull it out and check to see if the funkiness has reached an acceptable level.

I’ve also been told that dryer sheets could do the trick, but this is something I haven’t risked yet, as Vita finds them to be a treat of the same level of desirability as the "candy" the deer leave on the lawn. She hasn't shown any interest in my horses lately, no need to give her any incentives, right?

Brick Pavers

Another quiet day at the flea market; it’s not that there wasn’t anything to buy, but that I’ve been in more of a selling mode than a buying mode, and I already have plenty to sell. I have a rather big expense coming up this week too, that helped stay my hand the few times.

I guess there was a big model horse auction down in Indiana on Saturday; I was momentarily tempted, only because a Raffle Model Fiero was involved. It’s a long story, about a debt I’m not obligated to pay, but weighs heavily on my mind nonetheless.

The interest it generated on Blab quashed that idea almost immediately. I think it ended up going in the neighborhood of $600 - "cheap" in a relative sense, though not sufficiently for me. Good for the seller/estate, though, which is all that matters.

I’ve spent most of the weekend so far taking care of other old business, some of it model horse related, but mostly not. (The garden looks…better. Not good, but not embarrassing.)

I did a quick survey of my Polled Hereford Bull situation, and I have six, not five: one I had thought I sold I apparently didn’t. He’s very similar to another variation that I have, as in both of them appear to be made of one of those bright white, almost-Chalky Tenites they were messing around with in the early 1970s. (I haven’t found a "true" Chalky of the PHB - yet.)

The one I’ll be keeping is a very bright cinnamon color with high airbrushed socks, and the one that I’ll be selling (eventually) has shorter socks and more of a brick-red tone. Even thought they’re easily distinguishable, and not one of those only-I-can-see-it variations, I’ve gotten to the point where more subtle variations aren’t that much of a big deal to me anymore.

And besides, the PHB mold is BIG. He’s like a brick paver with legs. He has an almost Othello-like quality for eating up shelf space. There's only so many I can keep around.

One of my Polled Herefords who is not going anywhere for quite some time is this oddball that I picked up from Bob Peterson a while back:

He wasn’t too expensive, actually, because there’s not a lot of competition for rare and/or weird Polled Hereford Bulls. I’m not too sure what he was supposed to be - a touched up cull, maybe? Someone goofing around with the airbrush on their lunch break? A straight up test color? Something associated with the Robbins Weathervane program?

I tend to think that last supposition is the most likely, because he has a "piggy bank" slot cut out of his back that was done prior to painting, not unlike the drill holes that were done on the Weathervane models. I find his slot incredibly appropriate: if any model had sufficient interior space to store spare change, it’s the Polled Hereford Bull.

Ephemera and Granular Data

Sorry about that; it’s been a rough week, personally. Nothing you need to know about, other than it involved lots of heavy lifting, both literal and metaphorical. My workload will be lighter next week, so I hope that helps.

One thing that did lighten my load a little was the arrival of this beefy fellow, who I hope is the last thing I "have to" buy from That Guy in Arizona:

Polled Hereford Bull, with gray hooves and tan, not pink naughty bits. (Looks pinkish in photo, but definitely not in person!) I bid on the first one he had listed, and lost, but then he listed another using the same photo. I won him at a significantly lower price - low enough that it didn’t matter if he was a perfectly ordinary Polled Hereford, which is what most auction watchers probably assumed he was going to be.

So yay, tiny little victory for me. I sold a couple of my (duplicate) Polled Herefords recently, so I’m not 100 percent sure how many I have now. (Five, I think?)

I’m also warming up to the theory that my brother posited to me the other day, about these Arizona models: it could simply be the retirement stash of a Chicago-era Breyer employee.

This Arizona distraction aside, I’ve been trying to focus on the ephemera lately, anyway, due to my time and space issues. As you might have guessed from my earlier post about the 1973 Bentley Sales flier, I’ve come into a few more decent stashes. I won’t say my collection of Bentley Sales fliers is anywhere near complete, but it’s now big enough to merit a decent-sized binder of its own.

It’s neat and fascinating reading, especially when combined with the copies of the monthly sales tally sheets that Nancy Young sent me, years ago. It’s almost the very definition of granular data.

Yet, it’s not quite as helpful as you might think. Very few mail-order house Special Runs were truly "exclusive" back in the 1980s and early 1990s, so adding up the monthly sales figures for any given item for just one company isn’t going to give you a nice, neat number of items sold.

The numbers for special runs - especially pre-Reeves era - are also extremely fluid, more like estimates than hard numbers. They made what they could sell: if that meant making a few extra dozen - or cutting a run short that wasn’t moving - that’s what they did. 

Which ones that happened to, and to what degree, we will likely never know. No matter how finely grained our data on Breyer History get - and believe me, in places it’s positively silt-like - it will never be perfect.