Featured JAH: 7/29/2023, Spring 1993

 Hello, readers! Well, as you may have noticed, I stopped doing the Featured Model blog series last year, both because we had sold our house and moved to an apartment, and because I felt the series had run its course. Since then the post frequency on the blog has been down a bit without those extra four posts a month, which makes me sad. But anyways, I was extremely sleep-deprived last week, and while getting into my bed I saw a stack of my old JAH magazines nearby - and an idea popped into my head. Why not scan them all and then do a series of Featured JAH posts? There's a lot of information in those old magazines that's probably well-known by older people in the hobby (and people that were subscribers at the time they were published, like me), but not necessarily so well-known by newer people in the hobby. 

For those who aren't aware, JAH (Just About Horses) is/was the official Breyer publication to members of the hobby.  It began publication in 1975 and was published a varying number of times per year until 2011. The magazine contained articles about Breyer portrait horses, articles by sculptors detailing how various sculpts came to be, how-to articles (by people still active in the hobby today) for any and all aspects of customizing and tackmaking, surveys, sneak peeks of upcoming Breyer releases, special runs released only through JAH, probably more I'm forgetting, and of course Vintage Point, which was like the precursor to Identify Your Breyer. 

Since 2012, JAH has been published on a yearly basis and sent to Collector Club members at the end of the year, but the JAH we have now is a pale shadow of what it used to be, in my opinion. It was a repository of all things Breyer, collected in one place. The Collector Club has more-or-less replaced JAH, with more special runs and fewer informative articles. If I remember right, Breyer's reasoning for discontinuing JAH was due to increased publication costs, which the cost of a subscription must not have been able to cover, considering there was little to no outside advertising in the magazine.

The only problem with this new series is that my collection of JAH issues doesn't start until Spring 1993, which is rather late in the magazine's publication. Maybe in the future I'll be able to get my hands on some of the previous years and cover them then! Now, I'm not planning on scanning every single page in each magazine, because it would just be too time-consuming. Also, my apologies if the pages of the magazines aren't always in order - the scanning process turned out to be much more irritating than I thought it would be (my poor scanner has never worked so hard in its life!). My plan is to cover interesting things in the magazines but not necessarily everything in each issue. So, let's take a look at the Spring 1993 issue: 

On the front and back cover of this issue we see a Chincoteague Pony stallion and a mare and foal. JAH's cover photos were almost always of real horses, not models (at least in this era). 

As we can see on the first page, 1993 was the debut year of the Dawning gift set, featuring Mesteno as a foal with his mother. Mesteno was a Pryor Mountain mustang stallion who, along with various family members, had a number of Classic-scale portrait molds sculpted by artist Rowland Cheney. Also debuting in 1993 was the Buttons and Bows Grazing Mare and Foal set, Ichilay the Crow Horse on the Indian Pony and the ceramic (porcelain?) Performing Misty, which is still sought after today. On the opposite page you can see a typical table of contents for the magazine, staff information, etc.

On the next page is Editor's Desk, the note from the editor that appeared in every issue. JAH had a number of editors over the years, and at this time the editor was Megan Thilman. I won't always show the Editor's Desk page, but wanted to establish its existence. At the bottom of the page is a note that dressage Olympian Reiner Klimke's horse Ahlerich had passed on. JAH frequently published articles about various famous horses, whether they had received portrait models or not (I don't think Ahlerich ever had his own Breyer model). On the opposite page we see a notice about a computer breakdown at Breyer headquarters that resulted in loss of some data (heh) and an example of the Pen Pals page. 

On these two pages we find an article about the Hooved Animal Humane Society, and on the opposite page an example of the slightly-goofy humor of JAH in those days ("Announcements to the Teeming Millions," "Wake the kids, phone the neighbors, bribe your spouses..." and "...that's as rare as steak tartare. Ooh, bad joke."). I don't know, they gave me a chuckle at least.

I cropped out the other page here because it was the second part of a review of various old tack kits. Anyway, on this page we see a Blast from the Past, which featured various models of yesteryear in each issue. This issue's model was the raffle florentine Misty from Breyerfest 1990 (the first Breyerfest). 20 florentine Mistys were raffled off at that event, with a 21st sold at the live auction. The auction Misty was signed by Marguerite Henry and sold for a whopping $350, the equivalent of $739.02 in today's dollars (according to the inflation calculator). Huh - I would have expected a bigger increase. I'm pretty sure a florentine Misty signed by Marguerite Henry would sell for a lot more money nowadays!

There's also a photo of the 1993 Breyerfest Show Special on this page, a mini version of Chaparral (on the Fighting Stallion) issued on the Classic Rearing Stallion. I had one of these models that my grandparents found in an antique store circa 1998, though I've since sold him on. 

Speaking of Misty, here's the Vintage Point article for this issue: 

Like I said earlier, Vintage Point was like the precursor to Identify Your Breyer. If I wanted to see if a particular mold had been used for a particular release or color, I'd pull out my JAH issues and check. Uhhh, is Vintage Point still a part of JAH now? I can’t even remember. I don’t think it is. Anyway, the drawback was that the magazines couldn't be updated, so they might become out of date after a while. But Breyer didn't do quite as many special runs in those days, so it wasn't as much of an issue then as it would be now. So, the very last page of the issue would contain photos of all the releases for that mold. 

Other things I didn't cover in this issue: JAH used to have an extensive classified ads section (called Horse Trader) where people could advertise models they had for sale, and subscribers could buy things totally sight unseen from them (I bought a Traditional Black Stallion from someone using the classifieds, in the old days of personal checks!). There was also a Personals section, artists advertising their services, tack sales, publications and miscellaneous. In this issue, the classifieds section is 6.25 pages long, including one page dedicated to the Abbreviations Legend. The porcelain Shire Mare made her debut in this issue as well, one of the first sculptures Kathleen Moody did for Breyer. 

That brings me to the end of today's post - I hope you enjoyed it! Check back next Saturday for another installment of Featured JAH.