 In 1955, Hartland began including small brochures with most of the sets they shipped. Brochures showed the new sets and helped create additional demand, just like manufacturers do today. Hartland created roughly 26 different consumer brochures, most of which were thrown out the very day the set was opened—along with the box, tag and packing materials. 40 years later, they are difficult to find!
In the Fall of 1998, collector Bruce Schwartz and I began a mission to document and date all the known Hartland Brochures. Of course, at that time we didn’t really have a clue how many different ones we needed to find! He owned a lot of them. I had a few of them, but it was hard to know which one each had until I started scanning them an posting them on temporarily hidden pages on this site. There are very subtle differences in some of them. Eventually, we managed to get one of each known brochure on the site. After that, we began the task of trying to date them. Collector George Jones had always theorized that there was one for each year, but after a very short period of time, it became apparent that his theory had a flaw or two. There were more brochures than years Hartland Plastics produced the sets. Actually, his theory was fairly close to correct! In several of the middle years, Hartland printed two or even three brochures for that year, however, during the year the format remained the same. By format, I mean the size of the paper, color or ink, and the general characters didn't change much. There was an early 1957 brochure, for example, which had a drawing of Cochise and Washington, but the later version, in the same size and color, showed the sets with actual photos.
Once the yearly printing scenario was established, it was much easier to cross reference sets on the brochures with copyright notices on the tags or sets showing up in the Christmas catalogs. From Brochure #1, through about #20, it was actually pretty easy. Some of the later brochures required reviewing individual numbers listed on the sets and evaluating them accordingly. Overall, I think we have them correct in both order and dates. Bruce is always chasing down leads to possible other variations, but so far most of them have been fruitless.
In 1954, Hartland produced instructions for their large Western Champ sets and also Chief Thunderbird. They look almost identical in artistic style. The Thunderbird sheet lists other sets available by name and description. Some might consider that sheet as a brochure, but it is quite a bit different than any following Hartland Brochures. For that reason, I have separated it from the list and included it on the site as an instruction sheet along with the large Champ sheet.
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There are roughly 26 different brochures (plus a few dealer sheets) which require about 40 shots to illustrate. If you know which brochure you are looking for, you can save time by clicking on the page without the thumbnails. If you just want to browse around, click on the page with the thumbnails. It takes a little longer but the information will make a little more sense. (You can still access the larger images of each brochure from either page)
Click Here to see a text only page of information about brochures.
Click Here to see the same information along with a Thumbnail of each side of each brochure.
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