Lego Packaging

At the weekend, I spent a fair amount of time playing with Lego. It actually rather alarmed me just how easy my brain fell so quickly into the mindset of a 7 year old… First there was my eye’s ranging manically over the tumultuous heap of multi-coloured bricks, scanning for that all-important flat sixer brick in blue. The sound of the bricks being skimmed over. Then there was the incredible sense of focus; as far as I could tell there was just me, Harper ( a four year old), a huge pile of bricks and a yellow bungalow to be built – nothing else in the world. A sort of limitless primordial creativity comes with Lego and I love it implicitly for that.

My brother and I used to have two gigantic cardboard boxes full of Lego, which used to cause our parents endless torment once they had been avalanched onto the carpet. No matter how good your clean-up operation is, there was always one little brick left over and there really is nothing as painful to see as when a grown man puts his entire bodyweight onto a sharp plastic brick the size of a large pea.

We rarely kept our Lego boxes. Somehow they didn’t matter to us as kids. But Oh, how I wish we had. The vintage boxes from the 70′s and early 80′s were magnificently made and designed. Almost all of them had a trademark  lift-up flap, which exposed the whole set of components neatly packaged underneath a clear plastic sheet. The front was classically adorned with the dynamic Lego logo to the right and a bold, sans-serif font treatment (Helvetica Neue?)to describe the set. All giving an air of simplicity and uncomplicated creative freedom. The back was the place to find close-up analogue photographs of alternative designs that could be made with the bricks inside.  The whole thing was engineered to set a wild fizz to a kid’s imagination and it worked too.

Nowadays it’s all a bit ‘digital’ for my liking. Misbi has some really old sets from the 1960′s and I found a great sight that showcases some of the splendid catalogues from the 1970′s. There’s also this charming little video about the Lego Vault in Denmark. But without doubt, the greatest resource for vintage Lego on the web is Lugnet. I even found our beloved castle.