Antique and Vintage Wooden Toys

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Whether it's a set of blocks, a pull toy, or a child's rocking horse, wood has been a primary material of toys for as long as the idea of toys has existed. While wood was forced to make way for tin as a favored construction material among toy...
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Whether it's a set of blocks, a pull toy, or a child's rocking horse, wood has been a primary material of toys for as long as the idea of toys has existed. While wood was forced to make way for tin as a favored construction material among toy manufacturers beginning in the Industrial Revolution, vintage wooden toys from the Victorian Era and the first half of the 20th century remain popular with collectors. Wooden toys tended to revolve around a number of themes that offered children the chance to participate in such cultural institutions of the day as the circus. Schoenhut Humpy Dumpty Circus toys, manufactured from 1903 to 1935, included a ringmaster, acrobats, lion tamers, and horseback riders, along with a veritable Noah's Ark of animals, from lions and tigers and bears to even more exotic creatures like elephants, giraffes, rhinos, and zebras. The animals and their human-performer counterparts could be positioned under a circus tent, providing children with hours of open-ended play. One way to date vintage Schoenhut wooden circus animals is to look into their eyes—the earliest examples were made of glass, followed by eyes that were painted until that handmade technique was replaced by the application of decals. Less expensive to buy at the time were the circus animals and props produced by Playthings Manufacturing Company, whose Pull-Apart Animal Circus was a hit with kids in the 1920s. Made of thin cutout pieces of wood, the circus animals and performers were designed to lock into other pieces of wood so they could be positioned into acrobatic poses—a bear standing on its paw, a clown walking a wooden tightrope, etc. Another category of basic wooden toy is the block, sometimes stamped or embossed with a letter of the alphabet, other times just painted and left as a geometric shape. Between World War I and World War II, Halsam Products made colorful "Safety" blocks bearing letters, short words with their corresponding pictures, and Disney...
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