Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This comes with a big shout out to FB friend Stewart Patton who sent this to me recently. He posted it on our page a ways back and I had publicly drooled over it. It is an odd size, 6.5″x 8.5″ and printed all crooked. (I have cropped it a tiny bit to make the crookedness a bit less distracting.) There is no information on it. It is interesting in that from the waist up the little boy is in sharp focus and the rest isn’t, despite the shallowness of the space.

Stewart says this hails most recently from an antique’s mall in Denver, Colorado. It could easily go another way, but part of me feels like it could have been taken in Europe. At a glance, these toys seem to be European brands, although all also sold in this country.  Strange how this bookcase of toys seems to be set, freestanding, in the middle of a room – we can see the rest of the room peeking around the back, a spot of sun and a chair in evidence.

The toys are amazing and it kills me a bit that they aren’t in sharper focus! Still, there’s a hot black cat on the top right, a perfectly excellent elephant in front of it, and that righteous polka-dot stuffed toy at the bottom left. The line up of toy elephants and indistinct other animals on the middle shelf, bunnies and a myriad of things we can’t see on the second shelf, give the photo a sense of opulent excess. The multiples of some toys make it feel more like a toy store than one child’s toys. The print on the little boy’s shirt is great and the ball he is holding makes me think he’s literally got the world in his hands. What a very lucky fellow he was indeed!

(To see another photo of lucky childhood toy wonder have a quick look at my Tea Party photo post.)