Fascinating Tinplate

Book excerpt: Fascinating Tinplate depicts one of the largest private collections of tinplate toys in Germany, a collection that is here made public for the first time, in close-up photographs that lovingly animate a lost world of playthings. With their handpainted touches, fun wind-up mechanisms and evocations of a bygone epoch's nationalistic pride, tinplate toys offer a visual experience that contemporary toy production can only dream of, and this particular collection, which focuses in particular on early rarities of tinplate, conveys some of the flavor of the working and living conditions of yesteryear. We see begoggled drivers hunched over their steering wheels, passengers parading along a train platform and all manner of railways, cars, steamships, zeppelins and aeroplanes, all photographed as installed, to conjure a living panorama of daily life in the Wilhelminian Empire and the Weimar Republic.