The Discovery
This is the story of how we unearthed a rare collection of Lego from the 1950s and 1960s and how we identified the items and sets and what we decided to do with the collection.
The collection...
In 2015 I was giving my brother a tour of our new house in the Blue Mountains in NSW. We stopped by my children's play room and my eagle-eyed brother spotted a box of Lego poking through the chaos... and the rest, as they say, is history....
"Waffle" bottom
In our previous instalment "The discovery...", we outlined how we came to be in possession of a long lost box of vintage Lego. But what exactly do we have, how old is it and what can we do with it? Our first task is to sort through the pieces, looking for clues to which set or sets we have. The first clue is the "waffle" shape bottom of the white plates.
A 1960s Lego town waiting to be built
As we continue our investigation we have found a crucial piece of information as to the earliest of the Lego sets in the collection. Hidden among a number of flyers is a lovely little flyer describing the value of Lego in a child's creative development.
Did you know Lego made diecast trucks?
What intrigues us about the collection is the inclusion of some little plastic and metal cars in the collection. Our family thought we were Lego aficionados, yet we had never seen anything like these cars before.
Lego HO 1:87 scale cars
Putting the trucks aside, we now turn our attention to the cars. Built in the HO 1:87 scale there were quite a lot of models made in a large variety of colours. Probably the nicest touch is they were modelled on original full-sized motor vehicles.
The first ever Lego minifigures
So, onwards we go, next stop is Lego's first ever minifigs (or so we found out). Included in the collection were 9 small plastic figurines. Until we looked into the contents of the Town Plan Set, we assumed these were toys from another company that, at some point in history, were thrown into the Lego box.
The finer points of Lego street architecture
No town is complete without street furniture and, true to its authenticity, the Lego Town Set includes street signs, street lights, trees, an ESSO sign and a very sweet little petrol pump.
Random (but interesting!) vintage lego pieces in the collection
So finally, here are the last random pieces from the collection. And much like the minifigs and the street architecture, it has become clear we have many more items than the original Town Plan set contained.