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If you've a knack for LEGO history, chances are you've read/seen plenty of versions of the company's history. It's a well known story, and it's one that can be presented in many ways. Oftentimes there's an expression of passion and fascination from the author, not just being written as a textbook or a detached account. We all, as enthusiasts with a vested interest, want to explore that to its fullest extent.

You see it come out in NickOnPlanetRipple's LEGO Rewind, Slugger's retrospectives, even in something more casual like BrickTsar's vlogs. You see it in the sheer depth of The Unofficial Sets/Parts Collector's Guide, or the efforts of Brickset or BrickLink to catalog it all. There's a deep, captivating element around this company that leads us to want to search every corner. And that's special to me.

Samsonite is my corner.

As I've explored the wealth of information available on LEGO Samsonite, I've begun to lament how it is treated by historians and popular media alike. If you search for LEGO Samsonite's history, all sites tell it the same way. Samsonite got the license to produce LEGO for North America in 1961, produced sets under such, had quality problems with said sets, sales were poor, and LEGO took back the license in 1972 (for the US, at least). There are facts and sources cited, but they have been repeated and refined so much that it feels more as a fable than a history. And each retelling rarely has much more insight than the next, sometimes reducing it to a footnote. Or never even mentioning it.

As a result, we've established a preferred canon. One that is lauded by every source and never challenged. One that is cemented in our minds, wherein even five, ten, twenty new pieces of evidence working together in tandem are doubted instead of adopted. One that treats Samsonite as realm that which we can never truly know anything beyond the surface.

It's true most people connected to this story are aged or have since passed. Anecdotal memory runs rampant in this area, in which I've seen several unrelated people claim their father was the one responsible for bringing LEGO to North America. It's true that newspapers aren't perfect. I've seen many easily mistaken adverts using mismatched images and text, this site documents over twenty of them. It's true that catalogs aren't perfectly representative of what the store actually sold, FAO Schwarz from 1961-65 constantly struggled to show the correct images/branding.

But even with those limitations, we can rebuild what was never recorded. If we shared the sentiment that "nobody will ever know, and the only way to know is someone that was there" in all walks of life, we would know nothing beyond written history. We should welcome all forms of evidence, even those that are severely limited in what they can tell. But that requires immense care and honesty from the researcher. Otherwise they risk their work being rejected, rather than built upon.

In many ways, Samsonite's history has severely lacked that sort of diligence. That's not to dump on those who came before, it's only that hobbyist research without guidelines and access to sources can very easily go awry. You'll readily find so much about Samsonite posted online, presented as absolute fact, only for it to be easily disarmed by several forms of evidence. An easy example are the claims that 10+ sets were FAO exclusive, when none evidently were. This is what I call the "FAO of the gaps" fallacy.

That is not to imply malice on the part of those who came before, only that attitudes were casual and standards were lax. Observations were considered strong evidence (the observation that some sets with names like "Suburban" or "Diplomat" didn't appear in normal LEGO brochures or retailer catalogs), leading to assumptions (all sets with names were given them to make them feel luxury, thus they sold at FAO) based on a misunderstanding (in reality, all sets after 1968 were given a name, even basic sets). Hypotheses would be unfalsifiable, based on things assumed but never known. It caused assumptions to harden into law, to the point where the absence in an FAO catalog is not considered definitive proof to the contrary. Where the actual distribution channels are doubted.

I never set out to create what this has become, to record everything about Samsonite in such anal detail. It is the result of realizing I didn't know anything for certain. Everyone told the same story, yet no one agreed. Even for Samsonite's own corporate history, apart from LEGO, very little has actually been looked into.

I originally wanted to write about the 005 Discovery Set, but I was immensely frustrated to find that there were at least three different dates proposed for its release: 1966, 1967, and 1968. So I decided to investigate who was correct instead by throwing my hat into the ring.

The only way I've been able to make progress was to start from scratch, to let go of all we had gathered so far and organize it all myself. The result: I learned that all those proposed dates were misled. The answer I arrived at, when I was working with only a couple hundred sources, has only been strengthened. It has withstood the largest compilation of sources on this subject ever.

That is the reward of diligence.

My research has almost never been taking one source at its word and running with that. In order for something to be considered as reflective of reality, it needs to account for all available evidence. It needs to explain form numbers, box designs, magazine appearances, advertising in newspapers and catalogs, the parts within, and, most importantly, how it fits into the greater system. We don't just consider what works with our idea, we consider the weight of each particular piece of the puzzle. When things are slotted where they belong, everything just makes more sense. That's how we make progress.

What's unfortunate about this format is that I'm responsible for relaying information to you, I must support my claims but I also must respect the reader's patience. I can certainly link to one piece of evidence and show it directly, but I can't link everything.

I encourage you to dive deep yourself, to honestly engage with all that has been gathered. If your response is that "newspapers aren't ever trustworthy as sources", to reject the triangulation of all print media, then there's not much I can do. If you view all the evidence and still walk away with a different conclusion, then so be it.

But what you'll find is that what we've done here is not common practice in the LEGO sphere. People don't normally go through all the trouble to show all the evidence behind what they claim. They don't take you through the process of how they explored the mystery, all the possibilities they considered, the dead ends they reached.

What many (not all) popular LEGO histories do is instruct based on their beliefs. They veil any doubt and claim things they've never confirmed as absolute. They may cite a legitimate source, but fit it into the established canon, or interpret it for you. You are to trust that they've done their homework. Same with aggregate catalogs like Brickset or BrickLink: they give you an answer with little means to confirm it for yourself.

I want you to know what I don't know. I want my beliefs to be separate from truth. I am not an authority, I'm a collaborator. You are my collaborator, you will always have access to everything I've used. This isn't another rehash of what you can already find summarized online. We don't need it, this is a complete overhaul.

That is what will ultimately give the story behind LEGO Samsonite the justice it deserves. That is why I feel compelled to throw my hat in the ring. We are quickly approaching a time in which it is too late.

I can only do so much. Even with all that I've gathered and recorded, made accessible and easily searchable, that which in the beginning was claimed without regard for the future might be permanently engrained in common thought.

Thus, the goal with this complete history is to create a model source. This is not a casual, light study. We will be delving further into this topic than ever before. LEGO Samsonite is the main subject, but we will also compose a completely original history of Samsonite itself as well as cover early research efforts for LEGO Samsonite.

The current estimate for this history is 250,000 words. That is not a goal to hit nor should we strive to elongate this any more than it needs to be. Instead, I give that to demonstrate the sheer amount of story there is to tell about LEGO Samsonite.

Remember how most sources leave LEGO Samsonite as a footnote? Their loss is our opportunity.