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A worthwhile and successful journey is not reaching the final destination but instead fulfilling your original inspiration.

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When I originally began this project in April of 2025, I explicitly set my boundaries as only US LEGO Samsonite from 1961-72. That was what I was most experienced with, and I didn't see an errant need to tread outside of that bubble. My goal was simple: gather contemporary sources and build out the site based on those sources. I didn't expect to do anything new, only to provide more reliable information for the community to reference and build upon.

As I've written about before, this project uncovered so much about the US side of things that it completely rewrote its history. Completely unknown promotions, set variants, release dates and nuances, exclusives, etc. have finally been represented. But as those discoveries were being made, I realized something.

I may have thought USA LEGO Samsonite has been poorly documented in the past, but most of the issues were in regards to refining release dates and availability. Samsonite of Canada's history is broken at a fundamental level.

Previous attempts to rebuild its LEGO history have led to inaccuracies, and that's mainly due to the relative market size, leaving typical sources like advertisements few and far between. It also stemmed from treating USA Samsonite and Samsonite of Canada as a synchronous entity, but that was almost never the case after 1961 (it's an inevitable mistake when accounting for nearly one hundred years of history). A good example of that is that the 021 Wheel Set is popularly assumed to have been produced for the Canadian market. In reality, even from limited adverts, it seems Samsonite of Canada simply kept the 605 Wheel Toy in production beyond 1965. Which makes sense, as they were both similar sets at similar price points anyway, and Samsonite of Canada held onto the tube box design for much longer after 1965 as well.

But even for LEGO histories after 1973, there has never been a focus on Canadian nuance. It's usually lumped together with the USA or other regions. Thus we are faced with a seemingly impossible task. How does one accurately preserve that which they don't have access to or experience with?

So as the project stands, as of December of 2025, we are officially dividing the site into two sides: one for the US, and one to give the Canadian side much needed justice. I don't really know why I didn't think to mark Canadian materials previously, it just makes more sense to separate the regions. I suppose it had to do with my primary interest being the USA side of things, so the site's Canadian collection was only a handful of images.

As the site's collection grew, the approach was just to have all sets/promotions from both regions mixed together, but this often led to misunderstanding or blurring of information.

But you may bring up a fair point: "I thought you'd said that you didn't have access to Canadian Samsonite materials? Why is the site being divided?" Before, it was untenable due to the lack of information. Without resources onsite, I can't write.

This new change comes in response to a generous effort on the part of archivists like Stratford Bricks, several Canadian collectors, and even original owners of sets (that is how I got pictures of the 750 Educational Set, one of if not the hardest LEGO Samsonite sets to get images of). I'm always reaching out to collectors as I come across them, but you can always reach out yourself with corrections, information, or just to talk at [email protected].

Because of these contributions as well as my own updates, this section will have surpassed all previous efforts for Canadian Samsonite. We'll have adverts, images of all sides of boxes, catalogs, instructions, etc., all in high quality and freely searchable/available in one place. Many for the first time ever. Of course this won't be a complete collection to start, there are far too many sets that were distributed by Samsonite of Canada and volunteer archival work takes time, but we'll have a much better base than ever has been attempted previously.

To close, I'd like to adapt the original quote that started this archive:

A mystery will always spur an interest, and a journey will always gift experience.

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