(From Breyer History Diva, February, 2011)
The 1961 Insert Sheets materialized in the 1990s, and consisted of 4 single-sided duotone sheets, featuring the Fighting Stallion, the Mustang, the Five-Gaiter, and the Modernistic Buck and Doe. The sheets are physically undated and as far as I know, came without any other supplementary materials to help date them.
They are assumed to be from 1961 based on corroborating evidence from contemporaneous mail-order catalogs and magazine ads. They also have greater similarities to the design and color scheme of the 1960 Dealer’s Catalog than the 1963 one.
Back then, Breyer didn’t issue a new Dealer’s Catalog every year: it was just too expensive. They’d print one base catalog, and make additions via separately printed sheets that could be inserted later - either loosely, or stapled in a signature.
This was pretty much Breyer’s standard operating procedure up until the early 1970s, when they finally started printing new (or at least reformatted) catalogs every year. It sometimes makes for some difficulties in dating, especially in the Dealer Catalogs of the late 1960s.
The 1964 Dealer Sheets - featuring the Deer Family, Stretched Morgan, and Belgian - are a little less notorious, mainly because there’s less mystery surrounding them. For one thing, we already knew that these molds appeared in 1964: we have copies of the 1964 Breyer pricelist to prove it.
We don’t have any pricelists for the period of 1959 through 1962, however. (Oh, how I long for them!) That those four sheets appear as a set implies that they were all released within a short period of time from each other. Some of them in that group might have been released earlier than others, but they were all (I assume) available by the time the sheets were printed. And the most logical date for them is 1961.
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