Toy Story

Atractor chugging across the horizon piloted by a stalwart lone farmer--straw hat or feed store cap completing the profile--is an icon of Americana. That icon is reproduced with touching abundance in these two lavishly illustrated volumes: one about toy tractors and the other about the big, brutish, real thing. No matter how diminutive or gargantuan, however, tractors abstracted from their natural milieu are more Norman Rockwell than they are nostalgie de la boue.

To the uninitiated, the “world’s most fascinating tractors” tend to look very much alike, but it is astonishing to learn, in “Classic Tractors of the World,” that many of the international luxury car companies--Daimler, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Citroen and Renault among them--dabbled in the humble tractor arts. And rather stylishly at that; the 1921 Renault HO sports a tapered “alligator-style” hood. Judging by the advertising brochures produced by many of the European companies, there seems to have been a concerted effort to inject a little romance into the stolid hearts of tractor-buyers. In a 1960 “Fahr” brochure, a young Fraulein leans suggestively over the shoulder of a distracted-looking farmer who seems about to drive his bright red machine right off the road, and a 1957 photograph of a Fiat 18 “La Piccola,” or “Little One” verges on the Fellini-esque, showing a beautiful woman, sitting astride a peculiarly feminine number, mud swirled over its wheels like mascara.

But, for all their fresh paint, posed beside the barn most of the big boys bear a faintly pathetic look, collected but not used, as if they’ve been literally put out to pasture.

It is the toy tractors with their precisely crafted miniature accessories--plows, manure spreaders, grain drills, hay loaders--that are truly riveting, the stars of National Farm Toy Shows. The Lilliputian tractors also boast their own magazine, Toy Farmer, whose owners sold their farm to publish it. Like the magazine, “Toy Farm Tractors” chronicles the adventures of collectors who specialize in all kinds of toy tractor arcana--in combines or brand names (John Deere, Farmall)--or who customize, as does Ron Jenkins of Warren, Minn., who emphasizes the importance of verisimilitude: “I want to make a toy tractor look exactly like it did when it was out in the field.”

Oddly enough, it’s hard to picture these tractors out in the field, and it’s hard to picture a child playing with them. These are adult toys, serving adult needs. Largely the pastime of retired farmers, toy tractor collecting seems to engender a kind of soothing nostalgic amnesia regarding the realities of farm life. Anyone who has farmed--or even anyone who watched “Frontline’s” recent documentary about the draining lives of the Buschkoetters, a family practicing dry-farming in Nebraska--can tell you that farming is a dirty, dangerous, exhausting, often bankrupting job. But the wheels of these gleamingly clean candy-red or apple-green make-believe machines have never tasted mud or straw or manure.

For those who have struggled through the chaotic rigors of that life, dependent on the random whims of the weather and the markets, collectible toy tractors imply the opposite of real ones: comfort and leisure. These tractors will never break down, never stall, never blow a gasket. They will never have to be tended in freezing cold, in the dark, by the tiny toy men who ride them. They transform the memory of backbreaking work into the pleasant diversion of fine craftsmanship. In their shiny splendor, lined up on plywood shelves in somebody’s rec room, they look more like Faberge eggs than farm equipment. Collector John Kayser of Dell Rapids, S.D., captured the true nature of his hobby with Veblenesque clarity. “I don’t get down on my hands and knees and purr like a motor anymore,” he said. “But I do like to hook up an implement to a tractor and sit and look at it.”