Descrizione

Ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar. - Americans have been playing with toys since the days when the New World really was new. When Sir Walter Raleigh's colonists came to Roanoke Island in 1585, their daughters brought along their dolls. Ben Franklin, we know, paid too much for a tin whistle in 1713, when he was about seven years old. Eskimo boys had miniature harpoons. Plains Indian children played with tiny bows and arrows. It is with America's earliest days that this comprehensive, gorgeously illustrated history begins, and it is at the threshold of the 1990s that it ends. In between is a merry parade of the dolls, hoops, stilts, balls, and tops of the eighteenth century,- the toy soldiers, rocking horses, clockwork toys, building blocks, steam engines, cast-iron vehicles, mechanical banks, magic lanterns, putty blowers (a pea-shooter sort of toy that racked up at least 2,880,000 sales), and toy ships of the nineteenth century,- the air rifles, water pistols, cars, planes, replicas of comic-strip characters (Katzenjammer Kids, Popeye, the Peanuts gang, and many more), trains-including Ives, Lionel, American Flyer- Erector Sets, Raggedy Anns, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Tootsietoys, Tonka Trucks, Mr. Potato Head, Hula-Hoop, Barbie and Ken, Hot Wheels, Cabbage Patch Kids, Transformers, and Go-Bots of our own century. Award-winning author of Collecting Toys and Collecting Toy Soldiers, both recognized as the bibles of their field, Richard O'Brien magically evokes the wonder and nostalgia of toys in America In doing so, he tells the story of the famous as well as the virtually unknown inventors, manufacturers, and marketers behind the toys, certainly among the most imaginative and joyous objects our nation has ever produced. The great individual craftsmen, innovators, and entrepreneurs are here, including the Crandall family, Milton Bradley, the brothers Parker, Edward Ives, Joshua Lionel Cowen, A. C. Gilbert, and Louis Marx. ISBN 9780904568684