At 2pm Christmas Eve here in NZ everything is closing down. Staff are having xmas drinks and last minute shoppers are madly looking for the perfect gift before having to settle on a bar of Toblerone instead.
For me though 2pm has been the arrival of the NZ Post van with a parcel from Germany. A parcel that has been stuck in transit with no updates for over a week - and that I was starting to worry about. Inside the box was something I knew about but had never seen. Something I had been trying to get a photo of for years without success, and definitely something I never thought I would have in my collection.
This rare item is a 2006 limited edition set of hand-painted pewter Teuber Robbers. While the pewter robbers were available in larger numbers through the Catan shop, only 300 were made with special packing and numbered to be given away by Klaus Teuber himself. Even rarer this set is not only signed, but on the back it has a personalised note!
So how did this package come about? In mid November I got a message from a German lady called Annette who had seen my collection and offered to help me find items I may be missing. She also sent a pic of a few items she had been storing in a box for many years. And there amongst the Catan items was set 118 of 300 of the Teuber Robbers!!
I mentioned how rare these were and how I would love to get a better photo of the packet for my records. Instead Annette kindly offered to send them to me as a gift for my collection.
I think I went back at least twice asking was she sure, and I still don't think I have managed to thank her enough or describe how grateful I am. These rare robbers are to me a direct link to the great creator Klaus Teuber. He not only designed the robbers, but created a back story for them, promoted them, arranged production of them and ultimately gave these limited edition ones away to people he thought were special and deserved them.
That Annette was so generous to gift these to my collection is just incredibly humbling and they will have a pride of place on my shelf of robbers.
