Vintage 1980s Animals on a Swing Pencil Toppers 🎨 Set of 8 or 16

Size: 2 x 1.5 inches ~ New old stock, never played with. They vary a little one to the next.

🐰 Little Riders

Each topper is built the same way: a hollow plastic socket that slips over a pencil, a ring or arch frame rising off it, and a tiny swing hung from the top with a small molded animal riding the seat. The riders in my photos include a kangaroo, a frog, a cat with whiskers, a turtle with its arms raised, a chick with its wings spread, a bird, a floppy-eared bunny, a hippo, a second pink cat and a monkey - frames in red, green, white and purple, swings in blue, pink and green. Pick a set of 8 or 16 and you get an assorted mix; no two sets come out exactly alike, and honestly that's half the fun of them for me.

🎡 The Swingers Vending Card

Toppers built just like these - a ring or arch frame on a pencil socket, an animal riding a hanging swing - were sold for 25 cents out of vending machines under a header card that reads SWINGERS T.M. PENCIL TOPPERS, "NEW-HOT EVERYBODY LIKES" and "COLLECT ALL 12 SWINGERS," numbered C-413 and marked copyright D.V.S. 1988, Made in Hong Kong. The card's own art shows a bear, a frog, a chick, a turtle and a bunny riding these same swings, and it's easy to believe these came off a card just like it.

✏️ The Eraser End

These sit exactly where Hymen Lipman put the eraser. Lipman was born in Kingston, Jamaica on March 20, 1817, came to Philadelphia around 1829, and by 1840 had succeeded Samuel M. Stewart as the city's leading stationer. Three years later he founded the country's first envelope company, and on March 30, 1858 he patented a pencil with a rubber eraser fixed to the end - U.S. Patent 19,783. He sold that patent in 1862 to Joseph Reckendorfer for $100,000, a fortune at the time, and Reckendorfer sued the pencil maker Faber over it. In 1875 the Supreme Court ruled against him: joining a pencil to an eraser, the justices said, was just putting two known things together, nothing new about it. Lipman died in Philadelphia on November 4, 1893 - patent invalidated, but his idea very much still in use, right here on the end of these toppers.

🍬 From Gumballs to Gashapon

Little vending prizes like these have a real lineage. Gum vending machines date back to 1888, and the first machines dispensing actual gumballs followed in 1907, probably from the Thomas Adams Gum Co. The Norris Manufacturing Company patented its own machine in 1923 and ran its chrome "Master" line through the 1930s, a penny or a nickel a turn. The Northwestern Corporation, which started out in 1909 making kitchen matches, put out its Model 33 in 1933, and its Models 60 and 80 are still sold today. In 1934 the Ford Gum and Machine Company of Akron, New York started placing gumball machines whose profits helped fund the Lions Club and Kiwanis International. Capsule toy vending grew straight out of that American gumball trade: in 1965 the machines were exported to Japan, where Ryuzo Shigeta - remembered today as the Grandfather of Gacha - set up the first one and wrapped every prize inside a plastic ball. Bandai has run its own capsule machines under the Gashapon name since 1977, and had sold about 3.711 billion of the little toys by March 2021. These pencil toppers are American vending stock rather than gashapon, but they're kin - the same small surprise for a coin that turned into a whole world of collecting.