Rich Barbuto takes a look back at a Jack Scruby catalogue from the early 1970s. Scruby, one of the founders of the hobby, especially in the U.S., was producing a wide variety of figures in many eras and sizes, long before metal figures became more widely available.
The review, with some page shots, is on the Reviews page.
This certainly brings back lots of memories. I, too, still have my old Scruby catalogue. Jack didn’t date his catalogues, but my recollection is that I got mine in 1969 or 1970. My cover is a light gray, not the yellow of Rich’s. So, different catalogues, although the pages Rich included are all in my catalogue as well. I’ve also got a smaller catalogue (this one does have a yellow cover), that refers to The Soldier Factory in Cambria, California, where Jack moved his operation in 1973 (according to Wiki), so my yellow-covered catalogue dates to sometime after that move. For many years before he moved to Cambria, Jack operated out of Visalia, California. It’s worth noting that HistoriFigs still produces many of Jack’s old figures. You can find them at historifigs.com.
George
In the UK Scruby Figures were not quite so high profile, and yet this catalogue sets off the same kind of nostalgia, thanks for sharing Rich’ !
There are some pretty old Games Workshop catalogues on Archive.Org – this one is from 1983 https://archive.org/details/games_workshop_catalogue-1983/page/n1 , but the one that I wish that I’d kept was from around 1978 – it was essentially just a long list of games and figures that were available (which might just have included the Scruby Fantasy range, but I wouldn’t swear to that!) but it was flicked through and pondered over until it fell apart and needed multiple staple just to keep the pages together. In a fit of sensibility it inevitably ended up in the bin (at least….I think it did!).