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Advertising materials from 1955

drdavewatforddrdavewatford
in Ambassador
One of my fellow Ambassadors posted a link to some ancient LEGO advertising materials on the Ambassador forum. They apparently date back to 1955.

You can take a look by clicking on the link below - interesting stuff ! You can enlarge the individual images to take a closer look by clicking on them.

http://www.redshift.com/~shifflett/lego/mursten_byggebog/mursten_byggebog.html
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Comments

  • caperberrycaperberry
    Beautiful, the cartoons are so lively and I love the Mosaik pages!

    Would be amusing to put the instructions on pages 8/9 in front of a kid today and see what happened.
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  • IstokgIstokg
    That link is to the website of one of my LEGO acquaintances Dave Shifflett (of California). This is a Danish 1955-56 Ideas Brochure. Back then TLG produced bricks with slots in the sides for holding early classic windows/doors in place (they had "wings" on the sides, and no studs on top).

    The switch to non-slotted bricks happened in 1956, when the regular classic windows/doors were introduced (with studs on top). Then in 1958 another brick change allowed for tubes on the bottom of the bricks.

    The Mosaik sets (1300 and 1301) were a short lived unpopular 1955-56 series that were soon discontinued. Notice the HO trains... TLG promoted the use of LEGO with HO scale trains in their idea brochures and catalogs from 1955-57... but this was soon discontinued.

    In 1955 LEGO was only sold in 3 countries... Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
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  • mrseatlemrseatle
    Wow that is timeless fun. I like the lady planning the apartment building layout best.
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  • IstokgIstokg
    One of the things that is not easily apparent in this 1955 ideas booklet is that there were 2 window/door sizes at that time. There were the tall classic windows/doors that were 4 studs high for the door & Panorama window and 3 studs high for all the other windows.... and then there were the classic windows/doors that were 3 studs high for the door & Panorama window and 2 studs high for all the other windows.

    Plus these were available in red, white, blue, and dark blue. Some very rare examples are known in yellow (Sweden) and in green (Norway).

    Here are some blue and dark blue examples in both sizes...
    5 Shades of Early Blue (1954-56) Windows.jpg
    593 x 353 - 22K
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  • ninjagolightlyninjagolightly
    Those buildings actually have a pretty sweet mid-mod/Scan-mod look that might be hard to replicate with today's LEGO. I'm impressed. What a difference 60 years makes, and different is not always better.
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  • IstokgIstokg
    Two years after the 1955 Danish Ideas Book came out the next ideas book was a German one of 1957. By this time the modern classic windows/doors (1956-86) were introduced. The ones pictured in 5 shades of blue above didn't have studs on the windows, and depended on the "wings" on the sides to fit into the slotted bricks, which were discontinued in 1956.

    So in 1956 the red and white modern classic windows/doors were introduced. However the artwork in this 1957 catalog was produced by artists that didn't realize that blue windows were NOT going to be part of this new system of windows, and so we see some blue windows/doors... when actually none of these ever made it into production.

    This booklet continues the interesting architecture that was shown in the 1955 Danish book, but HO scale trains are no longer shown in any LEGO brochures or idea books. Also, the cartoon on the last page reads in German... "Mom... when's Dad going to bed?".....
    http://brickfetish.com/samsonite/catalog_1957_DE_01/

    Then next major ideas book after the 1955 Danish and 1957 German booklets is the first actually numbered idea book... the1960 introduced #238 "Idea Book No.1"... (released in many European languages)... later known in Britain as "Building Ideas Book No.2" and "Building Ideas Book No.3"... both different booklets actually fall under the 238 number.

    Below are 4 of the many different covers to the 1960-63 versions of the #238 Idea Book. These are discussed (ad nauseum) in Chapter 43 of my LEGO DVD... "LEGO IDEA BOOKS/BOOKLETS 1950-73".
    #238 GER-USA-UK-INT Idea Books.jpg
    800 x 1609 - 168K
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  • The_super_cardenasThe_super_cardenas
    I wish I had one :D although it would be impossible :(
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