Toy Instruments: Design, Nostalgia, Music (2010)

Toy Instruments: Design, Nostalgia, Music (2010)

Author: Eric Schneider  |  Page Count: 192

'Adorned with bizarre color schemes, always happy families and boys and girls immune to gender disharmony, the toys and the packaging create a Shangri-la sheen; albeit one that is out of tune.'

You can't put a price on the warm, fuzzy feeling that accompanies nostalgia. It's like an all-singing, all-dancing ferret has crawled inside you (a figurative ferret, let's be clear on that). But in publishing you can put a price on a picture book designed to encapsulate and encourage the ferret.

In the case of Toy Instruments it's an extortionate one. RRP is £13.95 for a 16.5 x 16.5 cm HB book with content that's 99% pictures. I paid 99p in a clearance sale, but for what it's worth I sincerely hope that author Eric Schneider still gets his royalties.

As the title suggests, its focus is instruments from a bygone era that were targeted at children. If you'd a toy that went plink-plink, peep-peep, and maybe even ting-ting, then you might find it displayed on the thick quality pages. I got lucky at the starting gate, having owned a little wooden piano like the one featured, the same colour and with scuff marks in the same places!

Items aren't the only attraction. Often they pale next to the treasure for the eyes that is box art. Many of the products are from China and Japan and even back then their box art was the best! But was it really necessary to crop the pictures to fit the square format? Wouldn't it have been better to show, oh, I don't know, the entire box that each toy came in? A crazy idea, huh?

The change from a traditional wooden styling to unnecessarily bulky electronic to branded plastic tat that made you sound like a voice from beyond the grave, or Optimus Prime's weaker brother with a robotic bronchial infection, offers a fascinating glimpse into the attitudes of toy makers in each of the distinctive decades represented (the 1950s to the 1990s).

Brief captions below each image give the manufacturer's name, the item's full name, date of release and country of origin (if known), but some of the text is difficult to read, being plain white on 1970s-styled gray, orange and pink backgrounds.

It's not a book that many people will re-read often, but because nostalgia warms the cockles it has merit outside of its presentation, and those feelings may well encourage some folks to at least revisit its charms from time to time, like I did recently.