[Crow's nest is my category for writing about sites and articles on the web that I find interesting, cool or just weird - you've been warned...]
I remember that many months ago I promised to go down to Kulmbach to visit the Deutsches Zinnfigurenmuseum (German pewter miniatures museum) on the Plassenburg. Well, that never really worked out, unfortunately… the more delighted I was to stumble upon a nice article on Spain’s largest toy soldier museum, the L’iber Museo de los soldaditos de plomo in Valencia (wow, they’re on Wikipedia, too).
I fondly remember during my travels in Spain that the museums of that country do have a certain fondness of pewter dioramas. For example when I visited the splendid Museo de Armería de Alava in Vitoria, I remember that much of the upper floor exhibit was made up of dioramas of various napoleonic battles, with a huge setup of the Battle of Vitoria in the center. So to me, it’s only natural that Spain has it’s own museum for pewter men…
From the article and the homepage one can say that it’s one of those well-funded private museums you can sometimes find – they have around 15 employees, they are situated in an historical palace right in the center of the city… they even founded their own company, Facan, to produce special miniatures to flesh out their collection – which at 1 Million miniatures might well be the largest in the world (though only 85,000 miniatures are on display, contrary to the 300,000 in Kulmbach). A sad thing I can’t find a homepage of that Facan company… would be interesting to see which miniatures they produce.
All those miniatures were (and are) collected by just one wealthy family, the Nogueras… now here’s a family dedicated to just one hobby – I would be delighted if my own family would support my hobby like that…
I noted some information in the article (not the museum) that are slightly askew, though. For example, they call Alymer the largest producer of pewter solders, which can only be called true if you count only manufacturers of pewter toy soldiers – I mean companies like Warlord (not to mention those not doing historical miniatures like Games Workshop) are probably way larger than Alymer…
All in all a museum I definitely want to visit some day… I’ll probably come to Kulmbach first and I will probably never travel to Valencia just for that museum, but once I’ll travel to southern Spain… I’ll surely make a stop here.
[via the Grandmaster B., boingboing and Smithsonian.com]
