Art Of Toys usually has quite a few Vintage toys from Marx Company so here is a great history from good ol Wikipedia on Marx. AOT includes this info with Marx toys
Louis Marx and Company
Louis Marx and Company was an American toy manufacturer from 1919 to 1978. Its boxes were imprinted with the slogan, “One of the many Marx toys, have you all of them?”
The Marx logo was the letters “MAR” in a circle with a large X through it, resembling a railroad crossing sign. Because of this, Marx toys are sometimes misidentified as “Mar” toys.
Marx’s toys included tinplate buildings, tin toys, toy soldiers, play sets, toy dinosaurs, mechanical toys, toy guns, action figures, dolls, dollhouses, toy cars, and HO scale and O scale toy trains. Marx’s less-expensive toys were extremely common in dime stores, and its larger, costlier toys were staples for catalog retailers such as Sears and Montgomery Ward, especially around Christmas. Although the company name is now largely forgotten except by toy collectors, several of the brands it developed remain strong icons in popular culture: Rock’em Sock’em Robots, introduced in 1964, was a Marx staple for years, and its best-selling sporty Big Wheel tricycle, which was introduced in 1969, and became one of the most popular toys of the 1970s, is enshrined in the National Toy Hall of Fame.
Founded in 1919 in New York City by Louis Marx and his brother David Marx, the company’s basic aim was to “give the customer more toy for less money,” and stressed that “quality is not negotiable”–two values that made the company highly successful. Initially, the company had no product designs and no manufacturing capacity, so Marx raised money by positioning itself as a middle man, studying available products, finding ways to make them cheaper, and then closing a sale. Funds raised from these effort proved sufficient to purchase tooling for two obsolete tin toys—called the Alabama Minstrel Dancer and Zippo the Climbing Monkey—from toymaker Ferdinand Strauss, one of Louis Marx’s former employers. With subtle changes, Marx was able to turn these toys into hits, selling more than 8 million of each within two years. Marx then bought the company it had subcontracted to manufacture the toys. By 1922, both Louis and David Marx were millionaires. Initially Marx produced few original toys, but was able to predict what toys would be hits and manufacture them less expensively than the competition. The yo-yo is an example: Although Marx is sometimes wrongly credited with inventing the toy, Marx was quick to market its own version, and during the 1920s sold an estimated 100 million of them.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louis Marx & Company
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