The Lego Book

In 1974, shortly after I unwillingly acquired a sister, my parents decided that the matchbox car they’d given me as a consolation prize was not working.  So my dad cut and saved coupons from the back of breakfast cereal packets to send away for some free Lego blocks.  Fortunately he stuffed up, and posted the coupons too late to be eligible for the box of blocks.  But the Lego people were kind, or maybe they just knew their market well, because although they couldn’t send be blocks, they did send me a pack of Lego people.  Specifically, they sent set #200, a mother, father, daughter, son and grandmother (complete with grey hair, worn in a bun) and my love affair with Lego began.

My Lego collection grew, though, in deference to my younger sister’s habit of putting everything in her mouth, my parents favored the larger Duplo blocks.  I acquired set #514 Pre School Building set, full of blocks and arches in bright primary colours, and a set of bogies, that I used to make trains for my people to travel on.  Being the smaller Lego, they didn’t click well into the Duplo, and often fell off. Only the Duplo people my sister acquired with Legoville set #524 traveled in true safely.

At Christmastime in 1977, a friend with cashed up Godparents got lucky and was given a battery operated Lego train.  As they’d previously given him a very gaudy gold music box in the shape of the Vatican, complete with saints waiving out of the windows, (which, while quite a talking piece among the children in the street, was not a lot of fun to play with), I suppose he really had earned his luck.  He was generous with the train too, allowing me to play with it for hours.  In fact, I played with it so often that I was asked to contribute my pocket money to the cost of replacement batteries.  Luckily, my parents decided that we should leave the country (for unrelated reasons) before my income could be garnered.

So how do I know all these detailed set numbers and dates of issue?  And how on earth does this relate to reading?  The answer is a set of two marvelous books published by Dorling Kindersley:  The Lego Book by Daniel Lipkowitz, and its companion Standing Small: A celebration of 30 years of the Lego Minifigure by Nevin Martell.    

These books are packed with illustrations, in what I think of as the Dorling Kindersley Style – clean white backgrounds, bright crisp photos, and snippets of informative text.  They chronicle the development of Lego, from the patenting of the first brick in 1958 to the present, and provide a reminder for every child who grew up with Lego of all the sets they had themselves, yearned for at the toyshop or begged for at Christmas time. 

Flicking through these books, I’ve been flooded by memories of my childhood; of playing with my own Lego collection, and with those belonging to cousins and friends. Mostly though, I remember how much fun we had, how the Lego would stay out on the lounge room floor for days as we grappled with construction problems and negotiated the demolition of one building to free up essential bricks for a new project.

I still have my Lego collection.  It lives in a large plastic box, shaped like a Lego brick, under my bed.  Though my Mum convinced me to give my Duplo away in 1981 (a decision I instantly regretted), the collection has grown considerably, thanks to a huge injection.  After years of marriage, my husband finally agreed to make the ultimate commitment and merge his Lego collection with mine.   We’re looking forward to the day when we can be confident that the kids can play with small Lego pieces without ingesting them, and the collection can be scattered across the lounge room floor again.