Vintage Club Julius

 Julius, the first release of the 2021 Vintage Club, arrived several weeks ago but I am just now unboxing him and taking photos for my files.

I am thrilled that Breyer brought back the gold stickers! Despite having gotten my first Breyers way back in the 1960s, I never had one with the gold tenite sticker. 

I do have one model with the original gold sticker now - one of my woodgrain Five Gaiters.

For Julius, Breyer replicated the shield form of the sticker.

But the wording is a bit different.

The Five Gaiter's also has a tiny USA at the bottom. Since Breyer outsources their production to China, they cannot put that USA on Julius's sticker.

He came in a cool retro box

and with a two-sided insert that has a lot of information on the vintage color red roan.

I think Julius is lovely, but has Breyer captured the original vintage color? I'll talk about that in a future blog post.

Stay 'tooned!

How Old is My Goebel?

One of the most important features in collectibility showing or in dating how old a piece might be is the stamp or sticker that comes with the model.

After a recent discussion on one of the Facebook clinky pages about how to determine the age of a Goebel piece, I decided to pull out my Goebel Shetland Pony  and see what I could learn about it.

 The pony was terribly hard to photograph as it is heavily glossed

 and that gloss reflects any and all light.

But I was able to get a good shot of the stamp on its belly, the key to figuring out when my piece was produced.

Photo from MI Hummel Porcelain Factory Marks and History Reference Guide. Downloaded with permission.

There it is! On the bottom, second from the left. My Shetland Pony was made sometime during 1972 - 1979, so it is forty to forty-seven years old.

Further reading on the web site says that you can narrow down the time period even further. If the mark is under the glaze (like mine), then the piece was made from 1972 - 1976, and if it is over the glaze, then it can be dated to 1976 - 1979. The color of the stamp may also be useful in determining age, although I could not find any reference to the color of this particular stamp having varied.

As a child that I used to pull all the stickers off my china pieces and the blue ribbon stickers off of my Breyers. Oh, how I wish I had not done that now! Stamps on a piece, however, be it one like the Goebel stamps above or a numbering system used by Lefton and other manufacturers, are better than stickers as they are a permanent part of the piece and cannot be removed.