Dollac, 1973. © Jim Heimann Collection. Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Perhaps you remember that American Girl doll companion you clutched close to your heart during your evening tea party by the dollhouse. Or the train track that looped around your living room in an incessant circular pattern, igniting your young mind with future visions of travel. Or the more simple pleasures of the Slinky, the Yo-Yo, and the toy-soldier with its ecstatic face. Despite parents today planting their kids down in a restaurant booth with an iPad in front of their faces, kids still go home to play with their favorite doll or build a castle out of bricks. Whatever toy you treasured that transported you into another world most likely still holds power in your psyche, still there in the fabric of your consciousness—like a Rorschach Test of the past. No matter how many years have turned to sand, the curiosity lingers with nostalgia across your body and mind.

Toys. 100 Years of All-American Toy Ads (TASCHEN, $40) delves into a century of print toy advertisements featuring toys that have phased in and out of pop-culture. Everything from science kits, ruffled dolls, worn baseball mitts, air rifles, model airplane kits, to our favorite Barbies and LEGOs, the book is compendious and almost spell-binding in its breadth of research. These archival advertisements mark varying moments in history, acting as a record of sorts, as toy print advertisements are all but phased out in today’s world, and kids now shop on their parent’s Amazon rather than picking something up from Toys “R” Us.

The Dayton Toy and Specialty Company, 1928. © Jim Heimann Collection. Courtesy of TASCHEN.

The beginning of the 20th century saw toys become a hot commodity that would entice children intergenerationally, fueling a flux of advertising that marketed toys as vehicles of educational attainment. Industrial mass production led to the boom of the toy industry, with European manufacturers first dominating the toy market, advertising soon permeating magazines, comic books, and television. The toy industry developed into a multimillion dollar industry, bombarding consumers with an influx of ads meant to alter the psyche of the target market. However, as Jim Heimann (co-writer of Toys, along with Steven Heller) states, the toy industry provides “gateways to a life of consumption—in this case, products designed to profit their maker even when camouflaged as educational.”

The result of this is highlighted by the book’s consistent revelations of largely gendered toys that mightily delineated specific categories for boys and girls. Guns, erector sets, and electric motors were pushed onto boys, while dolls and other toys designed to “recreate the domestic experience” were marketed towards girls. The consequences of this, along with other intersecting sociopolitical forces, came to fruition in the gender norms and roles that are still present in society today, reinforcing sexist treatment amongst what is considered feminine and masculine. Advertisements like “It’s fun to do housework mommy—with a real Bissell sweeper” fortify the gender norm that girls must do housework. Toys in the 1920’s largely served a “higher purpose,” according to the book, as “children who played with the guns and planes during the post-World War I era became the generation that would fight World War II.” In toys serving a political purpose, children “were indoctrinated to embrace nationalism and loyalty to the United States, even when hit hard by the Great Depression.”

Renewal, 1963. © Jim Heimann Collection. Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Toys describes the shift in advertising by the 80s and 90s, with ads progressing to target both the parent and the child. This shows the timeline of how fluctuations in the advertising of toys over time is inevitable, due to mass capitalist consumer culture and the shift in target audience. Inevitably, Toys. 100 Years of All-American Toy Ads lets us know that whether it’s the holiday season, your birthday, or just a random gift-giving expedition, there’s always a greater invisible hand behind the present. The impossible assemblage also highlights that every product, whether a toy or not, whether it be banal or vitally important, carries with it a weight of cultural relevancy that we may not always notice until many years later. Hindsight may be 20/20, and Toys does a beautiful job of creating a landscape of how humans—positively or negatively—have grown among the things we hold so dear, our precious friends made of plastic and glue, paint and paper, inanimate may they be, they hold so much power and weight in shaping our behavior and perspective.