Many construction sets were highly complicated and assembling them was tough, especially when the instructions were brief and complex, or when the pieces were very small, awkward to manipulate and unreliable. The Meccano Magazine encouraged communication with subscribers and received numerous letters of complaint about these and similar problems, which were often obscured and not addressed. Advertising typically promoted an idealised, unrealistic view of play, for example by showing constructions that were much taller than the children themselves and actually much bigger than what they could build with the content of the boxes. Toy manufacturers, who sponsored boys’ guilds and regularly organised competitions with attractive prizes, published accounts of these competitions that emphasised the triumph and enthusiasm of winners, while they failed to account for the disappointment of ‘the many who never managed to complete a model or lost the contest’.
