Word: toying
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Touring Western Europe this month for a peek at pre-Christmas toy sales, Christiansen pronounced himself "sat isfied" - as well he might have been...
Despite recessions in several countries, Lego's holiday sales on the Continent were running up to 20% ahead of last year's pace. What makes that perform ance all the more impressive is the fact that Lego thrives in the fad-ridden toy industry with just one main product line: construction kits consisting of interlocking, precision-molded plastic blocks that can be fashioned into almost any shape or mosaiclike pattern...
Once upon a time a certain Herr Drosselmeier, a hunchbacked, cranky old toy-maker, fashioned a very special toy--a nutcracker--and gave it to little Clara Siberhaus at her parents' Christmas party. While the grown-ups dance a minuet, Clara's pesky brother Fritz snatches the nutcracker out of his sister's arms and dashes it to the floor. She gathers the damaged toy in her arms and to attempts to nurse it back to health...
...Chicago last week for its final run, the crack New York Central passenger express was delayed by a derailment up the track, wound up at its destination nine hours late. That is the way things have been going for trains recently and not just for real ones either. Toy electric trains, the very symbol of Christmas for generations of middle-class American boys, have gradually been losing customers...
Proof again that toys are designed by adults for one another as often as for children. One can easily understand why in this elegant, color-illustrated survey of a key period in the toy industry's history, 1860-1914, when the Industrial Revolution brought new techniques to toymaking. Machines could now roll metal into thin sheets, punch out forms, and fold them into the shape of toys that could be sold in greater numbers and at cheaper prices; inner works, such as clockwork miniatures, gave charm and humor to acrobat cyclists, gardeners with watering cans, mothers with prams, even...