This is the 1958 box for Lego set 700/5.1 It shows three children so absorbed in play that they couldn’t even bother to look up at the camera. The children weren’t models but Lego’s managing director Godtfred Kirk Christiansen’s daughters Hanne (l) (who tragically died in an auto accident in 1968) and Gunhild (now Gunhild Johansen) as well as his son Kjeld (future owner of the company and heir to the Lego fortune).2
But let’s go back to the beginning. Ole Kirk Christiansen (or OKC) was a carpenter trying to make a living in the farming village of Billund, Denmark. When the depression hit his construction orders dwindled to nothing and he began to make small wooden goods, including toys, to survive. Soon these wooden toys became the focus of his business and in 1934 he renamed his “company” Lego.3 After the war and against all rational advice he invested in an plastic injection molding machine – the first in Denmark. By 1949 he was manufacturing a variety of plastic toys including a building block named the Automatic Binding Brick.
By this time his Ole’s third son (of four), Godtfred (or GKC) was helping with the management of the family enterprise. Unlike his father, who was happy to wrap his wooden toys in brown craft paper, Godtfred believed in the idea of proper packaging and promotion. The Automatic Binding Bricks were among the first to receive a 4-color illustrated box: