COVER GALLERY: TSR MAIL ORDER HOBBY SHOP CATALOGS

For many years TSR had a mail order operation, first linked to the Dungeon Hobby Shop retail establishment and then to the company proper called The Mail Order Hobby Shop. This operation worked till (we assume) 1994 because 1993 is the last year a catalog was released. It's important to note that The Mail Order Hobby Shop did not sell just TSR products but many titles from other companies so flipping them is a great way to get an idea of the adventure gaming market at the time. More, there was an UK operation, The Hobby Shop Catalogue, selling directly to consumers. Here we present a (we guess almost) complete cover gallery of the The Mail Order Hobby Shop catalogs, both annual and update ones. Of course, if you have any more images, please contact us!

We did not find any traces of The Mail Order Hobby Shop catalogs before this one: it's a 32 pages black and white booklet with no illustrations. Great Easley cover art!

After a long silence, we have a Winter 1985/Spring 1986 - it seems that the Spring 1984 edition saw service for a long time. Again, it's a a 32 pages black and white booklet with no images but this time we get an original Elmore cover that gives an all new meaning to the 'air mail delivery' concept!

This new catalog follows the previous one and it's bigger, with 48 black & white pages but still no images. This time Easley does an original drawing for the cover - let's deliver these orders, customers are waiting!

After a long wait, 1988 sees the release of a new catalog for The Mail Order Hobby Shop but this one is dramatically changed: full colour covers (and what a beautiful cover it is!), 122 (still black and white) pages long and a lot of customer tempting images. This is the catalog many collectors love to have and, by the way, it's the very first one we ever saw! 

In The Mail Order Hobby Shop 1988 catalog we noticed another very interesting feature: it was possible to order Classic D&D products not in English! Look at the prices and just think what is their value now... Alas, in subsequent editions of the catalog these products were listed no more . 

We found no traces of any 1989 catalog, it's possible the 1988 edition served for two years. No more original artwork for the covers... 

The 1991 edition of the catalog is 112 pages long, four in full colour (!) and paper quality is better. We guess everybody know the product the cover artwork comes from!

The 1992 edition is identical to the 1991 one in page length and use of colour, but the paper quality is even better. 

It seems that TSR had decided to wind down its mail order operation because this catalog is just 64 pages long and has no more full colour inserts. But it still has a great selection of products from many publishers and a lot of images.

It's always very difficult to find images of people working at TSR in non 'creative' roles, but the 1993 catalog showed a photo of the (entire?) The Mail Order Hobby Shop staff at work. With at least four people, it had to be a good sized business! 

TSR UK had always had a mail order operation advertised in, for example, newsletters such as Players Association News and in the Imagine magazine. But all these periodicals were cancelled not later than 1990. We have discovered that TSR UK printed at least three consumer oriented mail order catalogues: 1991, 1994 and 1995. It's quite likely that catalogs for other years were issued, but we found no trace of them. It's interesting to note that the 1994 Catalog lists French and German language AD&D products too for sale, but this feature was shelved and disappeared in the 1995 edition while the 1991 one has on offer which includes all the AD&D UK modules 2 to 7 as a gift!. 

The Mail Order Hobby Shop catalogs are quite difficult to find, especially the UK ones, because often who got them threw them away very often. Prices, however, may be quite reasonable - most collectors look for TSR catalogs and especially TSR retailers' catalogs who com,mand bery high prices.