I used to sell old toys from my cellar in the Nineties.
Sounds a bit weird but it was like a toy shop really.
Our old cellar opened out onto the garden at the back and was underground at the front on account of the house being built on the edge of a quarry. In fact it was one of a row of quarryworkers houses.
The garden door made the cellar and it was the 'shop entrance' really.
Hard to believe now but I did have some regular customers and they came from far and wide.
Once inside they were greeted by two aisles of old toys stacked on shelves. Some were in labelled plastic bins like loose action figures and die-cast cars. There were bins for other loose stuff from specific lines like Battlestar Galactica, James Bond Junior and Bucky O'Hare I seem to recall.
The best shelves had the boxed items and since it was the Nineties this meant lots of items from films from the past ten years, which often turned up at boot sales complete and still boxed for some reason.
There were the Ghostbusters firehouse, Ecto 1, Backpack, VW beetle, dragster and an electronic board game. These were joined by boxed Action Man telephones, Alien Hovertread, Captain America Coupe and tons more.
I particularly liked having duplicate boxed items on the shelves. It somehow made it even toy shoppier! I think the number one for this had to be a stack of Batman Animated Series batmobiles. They looked great in their boxes on top of each other.
These were joined by my favourite stock - any collactables from the 1989 Michael Keaton Batman movie, which in many ways kicked off my own collecting bug. For sale were loose figures, loose vehicles, McDonald's premiums, posters, jigsaws and cards, together with boxed items like a really cool batman desk tidy I found in a discount beauty store in Dewsbury!
Despite having a few regular shoppers my main outlet for the cellar inventory was mail order, which I adored having had so much fun as a kid getting stuff through the post myself.
Mail order in the nineties was all pre-internet and as such pre-eBay. It was done via snail mail, magazine ads and newspaper classifieds. My first lists were hand written and copied either using carbon paper or a photocopier. Those first lists had line drawings on them for extragarnish! I then advanced to typing lists of items and eventually printed folded booklets I could send out.
I sent all this lot to a growing group of mail customers and folks who responded to ads with their wants lists. It was all done using envelopes and second class stamps.
In 2003 we moved house to a place without a cellar. The cellar toy shop was no more and with the advent of EBay in 2000in the UK so were my mail order lists.
Still I'm glad I got chance to do all that and it was a huge amount of fun.
Did you send out mail order lists, wants lists or maybe even have a 'toy' shop at home readers?
