Santa Claus | 
 enlarge | Author: Luca Sacchi
Publisher: "Harry N. Abrams, Inc."
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $2.95
You Save: $14.00 (83%)
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Rating:  2 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.2 x 5.8 x 1.4
ISBN: 0810930897
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.2663
EAN: 9780810930896
Publication Date: October 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: New - Has remainder mark. Fast shipping from trusted wholesaler with many exclusive publisher contracts.
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Product Description
From the moment his now-familiar red-clad image first appeared on a Christmas card in 1885, Santa Claus has been the object of collectors ardors. Since 1989, Santa amasser extraordinaire Luca Sacchi has been gobbling up Claus-themed items from all over the world at flea markets, department stores, and by mail order. In this charming, pocket-sized volume, he opens up his vast collection, presenting 420 full-color images of the best, most hard-to-find pieces he has gathered. From salt-and-pepper shakers to soap dispensers, 1920s Limoges porcelain to 1970s tree ornaments, all bear Santa s iconic visage. Complementing these treasured objects are gingerbread man recipes, Christmas carol excerpts, and other textual passages evoking the holiday season. This book is the perfect stocking stuffer for collectors and anyone who loves Christmas.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Cute Pictures, Very Little Information December 29, 2006
CollectoResearcher
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is full of cute colorful photos of modern Santa items, and when I read that it featured photos of Santa Claus items from a Collection, I bought it and was expecting some collector-documentation info.
A few of the items have info captioned underneath their pictures, (midway through the book one caption says: "Miniature ornament (1 3/8 inches high, 1995. Hallmark") but most do not have any caption at all.
The book's Amazon description said:
"This book is the perfect stocking stuffer for collectors and anyone who loves Christmas."
I disagree...it is not "perfect" for collectors because the book is unpaginated and unindexed(annoying), and most of all because most of the items are unidentified. While some Santa items are identified as Hallmark, Lego, etc. many other Hallmarks, as well as other items are not identified at all. (For documentation on Hallmark, best to buy one of the many books about them, or get their free annual catalog.)
So, if a reader sees an item and wonders who made it, when it was made, and how to find it, the reader is mostly out of luck. One cannot go looking for an item, even on ebay, without some kind of identifying info.
Identifying the items would not have been difficult, in many of the cases, as the book features mainly relatively modern Santa items by current companies such as Enesco, Hallmark, Dept 56, Possible Dreams, Fitz and Floyd, etc. It is a mystery that some items are ID'ed while most are not.
The book's Amazon description also says, in part,
" .....he opens up his vast collection, presenting 420 full-color images of the best, most hard-to-find pieces he has gathered."
I would disagree, and as a Santa Collector, I think there are very few hard-to-find pieces in this book. Many are modern Hallmark Ornaments, and other massed produced pieces from 1973-present.
Size wise, it is a small chunky book, and is too small for my coffee table, and does not fit well onto my library of books on Christmas Collectibles.
Still, I rated it in the middle, at 3 stars, as it is simple fun....so for those who simply want to enjoy the whimsy of viewing the various recent Santa products the book is OK as a pure jaunt. For the Santa collector, it is, to me, unfinished...awiting documentation of each item pictured.
 The Kris Kringle File December 19, 2006
Robin Benson
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I bet this lovely, chunky little book will make an appearance every year with all the other Yuletide decorative keepsakes that families everywhere unpack each December. It's just bursting with Santa images (420 in fact) in all sorts of styles though most of them are three-dimensional. The book is beautifully designed and very graphic with a Santa on each page.
All of the items come from the collection of Luca Sacchi (the book was originally published in Italy) who fell under the spell of the fat man in 1989 and so far he has collected 1900 pieces. There are not many really old examples, a 1930 German metal box with Santa on the lid seems the oldest. Most pieces were probably produced in the last couple of decades, either for sale in America or Europe and probably made in the Far East. As well as plenty of tree ornaments Santa pops up in all sorts of guises: a sugar bowl, music box, a 1950 Celluloid bank, costume jewellery, cookie cutters and lots of those ceramic and resin tableau's put out by the collectibles industry.
The appeal of the book is such that it will be enjoyed by everyone but especially your kids while you struggle, this year, to put up and decorate the biggest tree ever.
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