CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/10/2020

A welcome sense of wonder in Holiday Gift Staff Pick, 'Space Fantasies 1:1'

This charming 1961 battery-operated Japanese toy Moon Patrol Vehicle is reproduced from Space Fantasies 1:1, Vitra Design Museum's gorgeous new oversized limited edition collecting 146 remarkable vintage aerospace-related toys from the collection of Rolf Fehlbaum, the museum's founder. "Space toys were meant to be toys, of course, but what attracts our interest is their surprising originality and sculptural quality," Fehlbaum and co-editor Fifo Stricker write. "While robots and astronauts are based on the human figure, differing in size and details but not in their basic structure, the space toys comprise a wide variety of objects. They range from miniature replicas of rockets to humorous inventions such as space dogs, space elephants, and even a space whale. Sometimes the space vehicles are manned by humans, sometimes by robots. Robots remain disconcerting and enigmatic, springing from a philosophical debate about mechanical servants and the dialectics of master/slave. Space toys, by contrast, evoke an optimistic belief in the progress and technologies that give us access to the universe of space exploration." Indeed, this volume captures all of the optimism that space exploration—and toys—carried in the post-war era. A welcome reprieve from today's urgent discussions around global warming and overpopulation of the planet. See more Holiday Gift Books for the Luxury Collector here.