Luxury Dinky Toys Displays

I remember, as a child, having quickly become aware that the price of many miniatures would be an obstacle to their acquisition. The first shock was the price tags affixed to the English Dinky Toys sold in crystal boxes. It was in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on a Sunday morning, I remember it very well. For the provincial that I was, it was surprising to find a shop open on a Sunday morning. I was with my paternal uncle. I can still see the rotating display with its Dinky Toys, and especially the high prices, indicated on labels affixed to the Plexiglas of the display. This gave them a de facto “luxury” side. I think I told myself that they must be exceptional. In hindsight, I wonder if Dinky Toys did not use this artifice as an element of distinction to promote the sale of these products. In commerce, artifice has always existed and still works: we often buy a high price as a guarantee of quality. Forty years later, I recreated this display at home, filled with Dinky Toys from that period.

The colors and silhouettes of these miniatures bring me back to that memory. The same goes for a few cars offered for sale this week: the Mercedes C111, the Monteverdi 375L, the Volkswagen 1200 “de luxe” (the aptly named one), the Ford Escort and the rare Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III in metallic red. Now they are quite affordable, I assure you. They form a coherent whole.

 

We now know that they did not meet the demand which had evolved considerably.

 

This week two other Dinky Toys from this period, but of French origin are offered. They should also be on this display. First of all the Abarth 2000. Its launch price was 18.5 Francs. It is a great success. The model is well proportioned, the angular shapes precisely rendered. I appreciate its finesse of execution.

 

It has in common with the other model proposed this week, the Moskvitch, the fact of not having had a great success and of having been shunned by collectors for a very long time. However, the latter is very interesting. It will have the particularity of having a derived model in the USSR (see blog).

I still wonder about the choice of the management of Meccano France. Why did they choose to reproduce this model? Were the wealthy customers of Dinky Toys ready to acquire a car from the land of the Soviets? On the rotating display described above, however, it displayed great originality. I may now have an element of an answer. My daughter recovered from a lot in Italy, a model with a very particular box. A sticker with a yellow background appears on two sides of the box, the inscription is different on each side. This sticker is of the same style as the one that was used to hide the design of the panel that was offered on the first series of Peugeot 404 police cars. The origin is therefore beyond doubt. We can read the name and address of Autoexport in Moscow. The same name and address that appear on the box of the Lada Mercury that was also distributed by this network. The design of the Dinky Toys model may have been partly subsidized by the Russians, which could explain the existence of the derived model manufactured in the USSR. It is possible that Novoexport has recovered some of the equipment. It is a modest but interesting discovery.

Let’s stay with the price tags. In forty years of business I have collected many touching testimonies from Norev collectors. The latter often turned to the products of the Villeurbanne brand because when they were children the moderate prices of the models were compatible with the family budget. There is often modesty in mentioning this reason but for some, it is impossible to switch to another brand. I thought about this when I saw the models offered this week. I looked up the period prices.

I found a price list from 1968, a year that roughly corresponds to the Dinky Toys models described above. Let’s compare the prices. The Opel Record No. 1 cost 4.5 Frs, the BMW 700 3 Frs and the Renault Dauphine 3.5 Frs. The Norev Baby 1.5 Frs. We can better understand the image that Norev has long had in the eyes of Dinky Toys buyers and the general public, that of a sub-product. This image has been reinforced by the fact that some productions have presented conservation problems over time (deformations).

Fortunately, this only affects part of the production. Today, these Norevs are generally more highly rated than Dinky Toys, and I find myself asking people who offer me Dinky Toys if they don’t have Norevs or C-I-Js! This always causes astonishment.

But it is a fact: if the production of Norev was much greater than that of Dinky Toys in volume, finding them new in boxes is difficult. In addition, the color palette is very wide, especially if you combine it as some amateurs with that of the interiors. In the end, it will have been the biggest upheaval of my professional life. A long time ago, it was on the advice of Mr. Gillereau that I started my collection of Norev.

The period sale prices of the three Jep miniatures on sale this week explain their commercial failure. Jep (contraction of Jouet de Paris) was a French brand created in 1920. Firmly established on the toy market, it initially distinguished itself with beautiful and faithful reproductions of 1/18 sheet metal automobiles and with quality mechanical and electric trains in “O” scale. After the war, toys began to become more democratic. It was necessary to offer less expensive toys.

Jep will go through the production of small-scale toys: HO for trains and 1/43 for cars. In the mid-fifties, Jep launches a range of 1/43 miniatures, injected in plastic and equipped with a zamac chassis. The quality is there. The boxes are superb, they are real cases that highlight the object. The experiment will be a failure. At the time, plastic is synonymous with mediocre quality toys and customers are not ready to pay such prices, despite the presence of the zamac chassis. I will also add that the very conservative choice of the models reproduced did not help the success.

Gégé, a doll maker, will make the same mistake with a similar choice of material and models. These models are now prized by enthusiasts. The boxes alone have an aesthetic interest justifying the acquisition. These models are in high demand abroad where they have apparently never been exported.

My favorite for these three Schuco Micro racer. At the time, the high price of these toys also reserved them for a wealthy clientele. These products were only found in very nice toy stores. German toys have always benefited from an image of quality and technical innovation. They do not have the poetry of French toys, but they are robust and unalterable. Schuco had organized its catalog by declining ranges of technical toys, including this Micro racer series. The latter includes vehicles reproduced at approximately 1/41 that are equipped with a wind-up mechanism with a key that I would dare to call unbreakable and a wheel used to orient the front axle, and therefore the turning radius. It is simple and effective. Production was spread over ten years. Housing the mechanism and the wheel without deforming the shapes of the reproduced car was a real challenge. This week a Mercedes SSK is scheduled. This miniature was a rarity forty years ago. Schuco had incorporated two “ancestors” into its catalogue, the second being a Mercer. It was a way of responding to the fashion that appeared at the beginning of the sixties which wanted to reproduce this type of car.

The “Hot Rod” is clearly aimed at the American market, a country to which Schuco exported a lot. During my trips to Pennsylvania where there is a large presence of German immigrants, it was a revelation to see the number of Schuco toys present on site at vintage toy events.

 

 

The third is a midget single-seater. These cars had their moment of glory, after the war, a period when people needed to be entertained. These single-seaters took part in spectacular races on circular dirt tracks. It is also the function of these toys to turn in circles… all you had to do was adjust the wheel to change the turning radius and wind up the mechanism.

Vincent Espinasse