Insert Sheets Part One

(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.

Insert Sheets

(From Breyer History Diva, Mach 2011)

Back to the Insert Sheets discussion. First, here are some scans of the little seen 1964 Inserts:




I really like the way these pages are designed; if I had the money-time-inclination, I’d have them blown up to one-sheet poster size and frame them for my office. (Note to the folks at Reeves, if you’re reading: you might want to look into this idea. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’d be into that sort of thing.)

You’ll note that unlike the 1963 Dealer’s Catalog, these sheets are not full-color. The 1963 Catalog was a bit of an outlier; most of Breyer’s marketing materials prior to the late 1960s were not printed in full-color. It wasn’t purely an aesthetic choice: full-color printing was expensive. If they could get away with printing something in a duotone, or with a spot color or two, they would.

A restricted color palette isn’t that big a deal, as long as the materials themselves are designed and rendered well. And for the most part, they were, but that’s another topic I haven’t even begun to research yet. (I met Richard Lewis once, in passing, about 10-12 years ago. Another one of those "wish I had a time machine for a do-over" moments.)

As far as I know, the 1962 Insert Sheets haven’t shown up - yet. Now there’s something I’d pay an almost-crazy amount of money for. It’s possible they may not even exist, but we didn’t know the 1961 Sheets existed, until they resurfaced.

We’ve got a good idea of which molds those sheets might feature - the Running Mare and Foal, the Western Prancing Horse, and maybe the Texas Longhorn Bull - but having those sheets would prove it, definitively. I’d be fine with finding that information via other routes, but the sheets themselves would be sweet.