Exciting Update for Boston Warehouse Spreader Database!
OK, maybe most people wouldn’t find my news to be exciting, per se — that might be a bit of an exaggeration. But to me, it certainly is.
I was able to make contact with someone at the Boston Warehouse company, and a couple of weeks ago they sent me a list generated by their computer, of all (or nearly all) the spreader sets that Boston Warehouse has ever issued, with the full model names and model numbers.
I’ve been working for months trying to put together a list of the sets BW issued, but this has been difficult, because often the back of the case isn’t shown in online listings, and that’s where the information usually is found (if the original sticker wasn’t torn off the case, that is). I had pictures of at least 150 unidentified sets — I didn’t know the correct name of the set, or model number, or year it was issued. Sometimes I wasn’t even completely sure an image was actually a BW set at all.
After working with BW’s Excel spreadsheet list for more than a week, I was able, by process of elimination, to identify all but about 20 of those sets (sometimes there was more than one model name that could fit the set in question).
I’m continuing to work with the lists, amending my BW Spreader Database with the correct names and model numbers for the sets of 4 and spreader house sets.
And I have images of nearly 70% of the sets in my Database. Finding the remaining images will be a job that will undoubtedly go on for years, giving me something to hunt for online. If anyone reading this blog has images of sets that are missing images, I’d greatly appreciate it if they would Contact Me.
BW’s list has made my Database far more accurate and useful now, and has helped me get much closer to answering one of my original questions that I started this blog with more than a decade ago: just how many spreader sets are out there to collect? Since BW probably made nearly half of the sets issued, this goes a long way toward getting me closer to the answer to that question.
I was able to distill BW’s original list of more than 1,300 sets down by eliminating the many re-issues of some sets and have determined that BW issued approximately:
- 680 sets of four spreaders
- 170 sets of two spreaders
- and 54 spreader house sets (with both two and four spreaders)
That’s a lot of spreader sets! More than 900 (I can’t be 100% precise, because I’ve tried to eliminate sets with plain decorative handles, counting only figural handles that depict things in 3D, and there are a few I’m not certain about from their names).
Although, I must admit feeling a certain wistfulness as I finished eagerly looking through BW’s list for the first time: I dearly wanted to know this information, but at the same time, I could now no longer imagine that there was an infinite variety of BW spreader sets out there, waiting to be discovered. Now I know the names of all the sets that have been issued, even if I haven’t seen what all them look like yet. (It’s somewhat like how humans have now explored the entire earth, and can no longer imagine that magical places like Shangri-La could exist in some remote region, waiting to be discovered; the wistfulness of knowledge.)
However, as I worked through the list, I did discover that there are several sets that I know with certainty to exist (I have images of the set and of the label), that were not included on BW’s list. Their list is apparently not 100% complete (perhaps when they switched to their new computer system, a few old models didn’t made the migration). So, maybe a few surprises still await me after all, out there on Ebay….
Many Thanks to Boston Warehouse for sharing this information with me (and with future collectors who will find it useful) — as well as for making so many delightful spreader sets 20-30 years ago!
