Hausser / Elastolin Catalog Reprints

The basis for collecting Elastolin are the sales catalogs of the former manufacturers. But especially early editions before 1940 are rare and therefore correspondingly expensive. So it is no wonder that there are sometimes very good reprints for these catalogs. This is basically not a problem, as long as these reprints are also marked as such when they are sold. The purpose of this article is to describe clear characteristics for some known reprints in order to be able to identify them accordingly.

General

With the advent of copying machines today, copies of old manufacturers' catalogs can be easily made. These are usually easy to recognize because the page margins of the original catalogs can be seen on the copies, or the quality of the illustrations is much poorer than on originals.

However, there are also very professionally made reprints of the original catalogs, which are not recognizable as such, at least not at first glance. In the following, some of these reprints are presented and the differences to the original catalogs are described.

Hausser / Elastolin catalog 1931 (dealer catalog)

This copy of the 1931 Elastolin dealer catalog is of high quality. However, it is easily recognizable by the cover. The cover of the original catalog is diagonally divided into two parts in red and blue. In contrast, the cover of the copy is in red.

Hausser / Elastolin catalog 1935

This catalog comes in three different versions. In two versions with 12 and 16 pages, the title page is in black and white. The third variant, with 32 pages, has a color title page with a cover on paper slightly firmer than that of the inside pages. The copy is relatively high quality, but easily distinguishable from the original catalog. The lower wide margin of the title page is white in the reprint, but yellowish in the original, analogous to the background in the image. Also, in the reprint, the antenna of the radio touches the edge of the catalog and is even partially cut off. However, this is not the case with the original. The dimensions of the original catalog are 285 mm x 224 mm. This is slightly larger than today's standard DIN A4 format.

Hausser / Elastolin catalog 1937/38

This copy is of very high quality and at first glance hardly distinguishable from the original catalog. However, on the reverse side, it is noticeable that on the copy, the hair of the upper jack touches the edge of the catalog, while on the original catalog, there is still a space of about 10mm between the hair and the edge of the catalog. The original catalog has a dimension of 294 mm x 210 mm and is thus somewhat smaller than the DINA 4 format common today.

Hausser / Elastolin catalog 1939

This 1939 Hausser catalog essentially reproduces the range of military display figures and accessories at that time. The reprint is of very high quality and difficult to distinguish from the original. In the lower part of the title page, the toy houses could have their address entered. However, this entry for the toy store "Hinkel & Kutschbach" makes it easy to identify the reprint.

The dimensions of the original catalog are 297 mm x 210 mm. This corresponds to today's DIN A4 format.

Hausser / Elastolin catalog 1939-40

This is the last pre-war Hausser catalog. Although this catalog is not particularly rare in its original form, there is still a professional reprint that was made before 1980. The individual pages were copied and stapled together. In the original, the pages are always printed on double pages, which were then stapled together at the fold as usual. In addition, the reprint can be easily identified by the cover sheet, which is in shades of gray. Another feature to note is that the cover page of the reprint is made of a thicker paper than the rest of the pages of the catalog.

Conclusion

The list of Hausser/Elastolin catalog reprints presented here makes no claim to completeness. There are certainly other very professional reprints. In principle, there is nothing wrong with such a reprint, since original catalogs are only available to a very limited extent, but the information contained in them contains important information for the serious collector. However, it is crucial that in a sale a reprint is also designated as such and not sold as an original to an unsophisticated collector.

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