Nuremberg Toy Museum

The Nuremberg Toy Museum in Nuremberg, Bavaria, is a municipal museum, which was founded in 1971. It is considered to be one of the most well known toy museums in the world, depicting the cultural history of toys from antiquity to the present.HistoryHallersches HausThe toy museum's building, located in Karlstraße 13–15, can be dated back to 1517 as being the property of Wilhelm Haller, senior, member of a patrician family. Jeweler, Paul Kandler bought the house in 1611 and had the front rebuilt for the first time (probably by Jakob Wolff senior). The oriel (this type of oriel is called a chörlein) was constructed roughly around 1720. A distinctive feature of the Hallersches Haus, but also of many other houses in Nuremberg, is the Dockengalerie, which is a wooden gallery built around an inner courtyard, connecting the adjacent buildings. 'Docken' refers to turned wooden balusters used for construction galleries and limbless wooden dolls.The estate was badly damaged during the World War II, but was rebuilt in the following years. Furthermore, the building is one of the stops of the “Historical Mile Nuremberg”.Lydia and Paul BayerThe core of the museum’s collection is approximately 12,000 toys, which have been collected over decades by Lydia and Paul Bayer . The Bayers had begun to put together a comprehensive collection of toys by the early 1920s although toys had not yet been recognized as having historico-cultural value. The private Lydia Bayer Museum, located in Neubaustraße in Würzburg, was open to the public.