The passing of another American icon of our childhoods, Jim Lovell, has made me nostalgic for some of the other Americans later in my life.
Having been collecting toys since 1989 some of the places I visited Stateside have also gone. Here are just a few threads of gossamer to a lost American world.
Alphaville
Alphaville was a vintage toys and collectables store I visited with my Missus in New York City way back in 2001 on my 40th birthday trip to the Big Apple.
The store was packed with fabulous mint and beautifully packaged toys and kitsch, a true Aladdin's cave. I was thrilled to be there having discovered them first as an online vintage toys shop, one of the earliest I can recall just as eBay was imported here from the States went live in the UK in 2000.
Remnants of Alphaville still exist online including the two gorgeous bits of artwork here, typical of the cool retro-lounge imagery of their website, a work of art in itself and a joy to browse. I really do miss Alphaville. It closed in 2010.
Toy Scouts Inc.
What can I say about Toy Scouts Inc? Only that their founder Bill Breugman single-handedly introduced me to a much wider world of vintage toys, than I hitherto knew about, in his fantastic book from the early 1990's, Toys of the Sixties, which I bought in 1993.
Bill wrote the History of Aurora too, which I have, as well as publishing one of the seminal American vintage toy collecting magazines, Model and Toy Collector.
I used to subscribe to Bill's auction catalogue, the heart of Toy Scouts Inc., and the one or two copies I have are prized possessions, jam-packed as they are with delicious collectables years before eBay. I think Toy Scouts are sadly no more.
Midtown Comics
This was another place we visited in 2001 in NYC, a large and well-known comics shop. I was stunned by the amount of stock they had and came away with a beautiful modern Green Hornet lunchbox and repro Captain Action Green Hornet outfit, both items for my toy fair stall I had back then.
I imagine, unlike the first two here, Midtown have gone from strength to strength given the popularity of comics and graphic novels.
Strand Bookstore
Again, in the January of 2001 the Missus and me spent a happy hour in this fabulous New York book shop, which I seem to recall being not too far from the business district of Wall Street and the ill-fated World Trade Center.
It was - and may well be still - a superb bookstore and the section on collecting toys a real treat. I was a fan of John Toyzilla Marshall back then so jumped at the chance of increasing my books by him, namely Comic Heros of the 1960's, a tome I still love to leaf through.
I hope the Strand has thrived and thrived.
Happy days
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Do you know any of these readers?
