Vintage Travel Souvenir Display

Some Other Stuff I collect besides old toys: vintage travel souvenirs. The kitschier they are, the better I like them. Today is the last day of school here in my town, and the kids are getting ready to start their summer vacation. I thought this might be a good time to post some pics from a display I did at my library, featuring my favorite vintage travel souvenirs. Enjoy the trip!

Some favorite pieces:

Old Dollhouse Grocery Shops

There was such a surprisingly positive reaction to my latest dollhouse grocery shop last week, I thought perhaps I should do a group post (I have six shops so far). So here they all are! They date from 1914 to the 1950s, and include American, German, Danish, and British examples.

My earliest shop was made by the American toy company, Cass, in 1914. It's constructed of cardboard, with a little wooden counter, and measures about 9 inches tall. The base the counter rests on folds up into the store for storage. The cough drop box on the top shelf is original to the store, while the other pieces, while old, are not, but they seemed suitable. It's amazing to me that such a fragile little toy has survived for so long.

On the bottom shelf is one of my oddest old dollhouse food items, a 1 1/2 inch cardboard and tin can of "Heinz Vegetable Salad in Mayonnaise." I nominate it for Most Disgusting-Sounding Canned Food Item ever conceived. Blecch.

Next is my 1920s Danish grocery shop, staffed by a 5 inch Steiff bear. The shop is 16 inches wide by 7 1/2 inches tall. It's made of wood, with a separate counter, and retains many of its original items.

This shop is unusual in that it features a display window, and the back is printed with advertising:

"Could I interest you in some Knakbrod?"

 

Here is the first antique dollhouse shop I acquired: a 1930s German Art Deco style grocery. Made of wood and measuring 14 1/2 inches wide by 8 inches tall, it came with lots of old products, and I've added some more. Some of my loveliest, and oldest, dollhouse food is in this shop, including plaster meats, sausages, and cakes from the late 1800s-1920s.

My 5 inch Steiff bear staffs the cheese and sausage counter:

A closeup of the cake shelves:

Some closeups of the meat and cake items, all very old German-made plaster pieces:

This next shop is a lithographed tin grocery made in America by Wolverine Toys in the 1930s. It's the largest of my shops, measuring 20 1/4 inches wide by 12 inches tall. The two lithographed side panels fold in to close the shop up for storage. It's missing its separate counter, but the phone and scale, as well as most of the products, are original to this set.

Both side panels feature fantastic illustrations of children shopping in the store. On the left side, a little boy in denim overalls and a cap purchases a can of tomatoes and box of tea (?) from a clerk with a '30s platinum marcelled hairdo:

 The right side panel shows an adorable little girl choosing sausages at the butcher's counter:

My smallest dollhouse grocery shop is this one, made in America in the 1940s, wooden, and measuring only 10 inches tall by 4 3/4 inches wide. I believe almost all the products are original to this piece, with the exception of a few Grandmother Stover's and Dolly Dear accessories. The counter features an attached "paper roll" (made of wood) on the left side.

The week's shopping, ready to be bagged.

My most recent, and one of my most unusual, shops, is this 1950s-early '60s British "Circle Grocery", also made of wood. It's quite large, measuring 15 inches wide by 10 inches tall, and distinctively painted in red and turquoise. Being British, it naturally came with lots of packages of tea, as well as many other interesting pieces. The groceries upon the counter are a much smaller scale than those on the shelves, but it all came together and seems to work out. The golliwog sticker on the counter was a premium from Robertson's, which I believe was a preserves manufacturer.

 The itty bitty Ovaltine can and Lyons Ready-Mix Pudding box 

are particularly cute:

Vintage Boxed Toy Tea Set

Although I don't much like tea in real life, for some reason I love toy tea sets, and am always on the lookout for another one to add to my collection. The dollies and teddy bears just can't get enough tea sets.
My most recent find was this, a very unusual boxed wooden set, circa the 1950s or early '60s. The small box measures just 4 inches wide, and contains a complete set of tiny tea things, along with four legs that, when inserted into the box lid, create a tea table. It's pretty amazing.

The assembled box-table:

Freaky Marx Dollhouse Family

I found this family of vintage dollhouse dolls in their original box while antiquing for my birthday last weekend. They were made by the Marx Company in the early 1960s, and have plastic heads, hands, and shoes on poseable wire bodies with felt clothing. The children are about three inches tall, the parents five.

They're really not terribly attractive dolls, and they're also not nearly as old as most of the dollhouse pieces I usually collect. But here's why I bought them: their faces. Fast, haphazard painting by a factory line employee in Hong Kong has unintentionally resulted in crazy expressions. Mom looks like she's smelled something bad, and dad looks...well, I can't quite place his expression. Chagrin? Discomfort? A guilty conscience? The sudden realization that he left the toilet seat up? Stunned disbelief at learning the swaddled baby isn't his? Who knows, but it's definitely amusing.

Meanwhile, brother's expression can only be described as "shifty", as he glances toward his innocent little sister, malice clearly apparent in his cold, beady eyes:

Marx Troll Village

A few months ago, back when I did my troll blog-a-thon, I mentioned my longing for the elusive 1960s Marx Troll Village playset. I finally got one for my birthday: yay! 

The Marx Toy Company made all sorts of playsets like these back in the 1950s and '60s: western ranches, medieval castles, army forts, family farms, and pretty much any other imaginative setting a kid could want, complete with tiny figures, buildings, and a box or case that held all the parts.

The Troll Village is one of their most unusual such sets, as well as one of their smallest. The box measures 10 inches wide, and the little trolls within are only 1 1/2 inches tall, the size of a typical gumball machine prize troll. The set includes trolls, animals, fences, rocks, trees and foliage, a little house, and caves. Originally it also had a printed vinyl playmat, but this is often missing from the set, as it is with mine. Still, it's a fantastic toy for troll lovers, and no good troll collection can consider itself complete without one.

 The village. As you can see, many pieces are delightfully
out of scale with each other.

The little troll house is just 4 inches tall, with a crazy roofline.

Hangin' out in the troll cave...

Two of Troll Village's denizens.
As you can see from the troll in the back,
the village is not officially a nudist colony.

For a sense of scale, a Troll Village troll is on the right,
next to a standard-sized, 3 inch troll
also made by Marx. Their trolls have a very distinctive appearance.

Vintage Barbie Thermos

My final garage sale find this past weekend was a great vintage Barbie thermos, labelled 1962. It features the original ponytail Barbie in various outfits. Now I just have to find the matching lunchbox...

Dutch Village Puzzle

At a garage sale this weekend, I found this great wooden puzzle. It was made in Holland by Simplex, I'm guessing around the 1950s, and has a diameter of 7 1/2 inches. It features a charming village scene, and the great thing is, the pieces are quite thick, and when removed, can stand up to make a three-dimensional play town. Just a really great, cheery-looking toy!

Dollhouse Kitchen Set

Found these at a garage sale over the weekend, but can't readily identify them. They remind me of the very simple "educational" toy company dollhouses made for preschools, and appear to be from the 1950s or thereabouts. The baby is in a highchair on wheels: wheeee!

1950s Pedigree Teddy Bear

At an antique show this past weekend, I found this rather odd teddy bear, made in Ireland by Pedigree in the 1950s. He has such a strange conformation, with those loooong legs and itty bitty stumpy arms:

And his head is even odder, described by several of my teddy bear guide books as "bulbous", with gigantic, oversized eyes and a huge schnoz made of molded felt. I've never seen a bear with features that fill so much of his face:

Vintage Trolls

Found these two fab 1960s trolls at an antique show last weekend. They're early DAM trolls, in the scarcer 5 1/2 inch size. Both have mohair wigs and their original clothes. The guy in yellow has glass eyes, while his blue-haired friend sports a purple "spiral" pair.

It's always a thrill to spot good quality old trolls at a show or shop. They're really not that easy to find, which seems strange, considering the vast numbers of them made in the 1960s. But they got a lot of play back in the day, and their materials (early vinyl, felt, and mohair) tended to not hold up too well. Save 'em if you see 'em!

1960s Four-Unit Vending Machine

Lugged home from an antique show last weekend was this 1960s four-unit vending machine. Made in Canada by the Beaver Machine Corporation (still in business today), it holds two 1 cent, one 5 cent, and one 10 cent vendor, and measures almost 4 feet tall. Three of the machines need restoration, but the stand itself is in pretty good shape. (It looks worse than it is in this photo, only because it's really dirty. I had to haul it out of a muddy field.)

And the best part of all: one of the globes still contained a bunch of old vending prizes, and not just any prizes, but rather valuable mechanical ones, including little skulls with pop-out eyes and tongues, and teeny apples with worms that poke out when you turn the top.

I bought these two 1 inch gumball prizes a few years ago, along with their original vending machine sign, and they actually cost almost as much as this whole machine did ($35), so it was super-exciting to find all these in one of the globes:

Woo-hoo! Lotsa skulls!

And here are the mechanical apples, also about an inch tall each:

 Kinda gross, but still really cool old gumball prizes.