Jeffrey Hammond

This is the story of a middle-aged college professor who gets reacquainted with the Louis Marx toys/playsets of his childhood and starts to collect them again as an adult.

I did not have Louis Marx toys. In fact, the plastic toys I owned were not Louis Marx, after all. Thus, I was somewhat bored by the extensive discussion of Louis Marx. However, for me, this book really picked up when the author ruminated about collectors and their obsessions, why and how they collect.

If you collect and/or played with Louis Marx toys, you'd probably love this book. If, like me, you tend to accumulate (i.e., collect) stuff, you may enjoy it anyway. I'm neutral about it, overall. It had its moments but not enough of them.… (more)

Since I am an avid collector of a number of different items, I was confident I would appreciate Hammond's thin volume on collecting. What I had not taken into consideration is that none of my collections include toys. I have never arranged my Saltglazed Stoneware into a fort and I have never thought of my turn of the century stock certificates as anything but cool to look at. In order to fully appreciate Hammond's work, I believe I would need to engage in some good-old-fashioned political smack talk with my presidential campaign buttons - fully expecting them to respond - and then I'll either understand his work...or be so far gone not to notice.

He may have hit it on the head in his last chapter when he explains that non-collectors do not understand collectors. And evidently, neither do other collectors.

There was some good writing in this slim work. I chuckled at several of his situations and found good solace in the final chapter on the overall phenomenon of collecting. But then the toys started talking to each other. Then to him. Then to each other again. Add a debilitating level of detail of not only Marx toys but the characters and situations they represent (I know more about Roy Rogers than I ever cared to learn) and you have a work which I couldn't wait to end.… (more)