Galt Wooden Tadpole fishing puzzle

A delightful find from last weeks car boot. A super 1960s wooden puzzle from Galt Toys. We think its designed by Fredun Shapur. We first encountered Shapurs Playsacks at the Bethnal Green toy museum in London. He produced lots of fabulous items for Galt including several other wooden puzzles. 

We found the puzzle board above without any pieces, but hunting through the sellers other detritus we were delighted to find nearly all the pieces.

As you can see, we are still missing the girls leg. Weve seen a similar puzzle by galt, but this appears to be a bit earlier. Below you can see the puzzle without the pieces in.

 You may be interested to know that a Fredun Shapur show is coming to London's Kemistry Gallery in October 2014, which should be very exciting. I understand Mr Shapur may even be there himself. Perhaps we'll be able to verify if this puzzle is actually by him. If you cant wait that long a 133 page booklet about Shapur was released a while back called playing with design, you can see it here.

Oh! and if you do happen to find the girls missing leg do drop me a line, and let me know!

Going Metric tea towels

A couple of tea towels I missed out last week........Grrrrrrrr!

Electrical Association for Women: 1970s Wiring Tea Towel

As promised in my last post, here is the tea towel that was issued by The Electrical Association for Women! It dates from the early 1970s when the wiring colours, inside electrical plugs changed from red, green and black to blue, brown, yellow & green.

Why they produced a tea towel, I dont know?

Loony Links- An Educational Construction toy from Kohner

A strange plastic construction toy to start the new year! It comes from the same company that brought us Pop -o-matic Bingo, Kohner. Brightly coloured, plastic limbs are snapped together to different torsos to give you several interesting characters!

1969 Britains Cotton- Education Pack

Heres a curious find from a car boot, this summer. As is so often the case, just as we were about to leave, this brilliant educational pack turned up on the penultimate stall.

Released by The Textile Councils, Education department, this box has all manner of samples relating to the cotton industry. Britain's Cottons- Samples of Cotton, from field to fabric is beautifully designed and details various aspects of the industry for the year 1969.





















A couple of statistics from the printed sheet above, stand out. In 1969 a total of 122,029 people were employed in the textile industry, and the UK exported £53,227,000 worth of cotton and man made fibre that year. I wonder what the figures were for the UK, last year?


















Above are some close ups of the sample book, along with a Cotton Boll sample. I bet The Textile council dont send boxes like this out to schools anymore?

Terraced House Books 2

Heres some more books from Peter Heaslip in the Terraced House series.

Not so easy Ladybird Reading Scheme

Heres an odd one!

Intrigued by the cover, I initially presumed these two Ladybird books were Dutch, but it turns out they were part of The Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA). Devised in 1961 the idea was to teach children to read phonetically. This meant devising new letters and symbols for some sounds. In total there were 44 symbols in the new alphabet.

The two books here are from the Ladybird 606 series, People at work (or should that be "Pepl at wurk") are The Fisherman & The Policeman. Ladybird translated a number of books into ITA under the title "eezy-reeding". Apparently they are now quite rare.

At the height of its popularity in 1970 the ITA scheme was estimated to be in 4000 schools. Theres a few more examples tagged over at flickr. See if you can work out whats going on?

Below the opening page from The poleesman.