Reading – Blast Off!
“Who could have believed that a toy robot made in Japan from scrap tin would one day fetch nearly $70,000 at a Sotheby`s auction? Blast Off! chronicles the golden era of space toys, an age of imagination unbound by the more mundane realities of space travel ushered in by Sputnik and the Space Age. Containing hundreds of striking color photos of some of the most beautiful and ofttimes bizarre toys ever created — many never before seen in print — Blast Off! unearths the nearly lost histories of these space treasures and the companies that created them.”
Actually, re-reading would be more appropriate, since this is one of those books I’ve owned for several years and it still gets pulled off of the shelf and flipped through. A hardcover packed with great photos of sci-fi toys of the 20s through 60s (with most of the toys from the 50s), Blast Off! Rockets, Robots, Ray Guns, and Rarities from the Golden Age of Space Toys is a very fun book and one that any fan of sci-fi toys should at least flip through once.
The last chapter of the book covers tin robot toys and it’s full of awesome, with dozens of photos of toys that I will never own. This is probably the closest that I’ll come to some of these beauties.
I have never heard of this book before, but now that I know I must own a copy. I love anything from the 20s, 30s, and 40s (big art deco fan here). I especially love the 40s and 50s interpretations of what space vehicles and robots would look like. Thanks for bringing this book to my attention.
If you love retro sci-fi then you’re gonna love this book, Clark. There are chapters on different sci-fi serials, chapters on specific toy companies, and even a chapter on “roleplay” toys from the fifties (helmets, ray guns, etc.). It’s a very fun book.
That’s awesome… now they need a second edition that covers the massive boom in Sci-Fi collectables that popped up in the mid-to-late 70’s!