If you collect Marklin Z regular production or special imprints before 1997 your helpful guides on the journey are the very informative Koll catalogs from 1996 and 1997. Koll published two catalogs for each year: “Marklin SpurZ” and Marklin SpurZ Speczial”. The two Marklin SpurZ catalogs cover regular production items and their variants along with approximate valuations. The “Speczial’s” catalogs cover special imprints produced and printed by Marklin almost completely illustrated and accompanied by edition size, valuation and Koll’s number. The Koll’s number is important in that it identifies year produced and sequence of release that year. Marklin has produced special editions and one time series locomotive and car sets sometimes accompanied by a numbered certificate, special imprints including white box editions are a little different often produced in editions as small as 100 and commissioned privately; they have never been available through the dealer network, collectors of special imprints purchase these cars through secondary market passing from the original owners through dealers and then new collectors. One exception are Hbis style cars with Swiss imprints, they were produced for the Swiss market in an edition size of 300, but they were sometimes then imported to USA dealers without being sold in Switzerland first. Great graphics and rarity have been two reasons to collect Marklin special imprints, but gaining a wider understanding of the companies depicted on these cars adds tremendously to the appreciation of the historical value of collecting Marklin Z.
Notes:
-Special Imprints are also assigned another set of numbers besides Koll, these numbers are known as ‘Miba-Monk’ numbers based on the collection of Gilles Monk of Belgium, they are assigned numbers based on the sequential release dates. There are thousands of special imprints so the work of archiving these very special cars is to be admired.
-Special Imprints also include another subset referred to as ‘Industry Prints’. Industry prints are not covered in the Koll catalogs. Industry Prints were privately printed in Germany by Baur-Druck Bad Waldsee and sold by Schmidt, Germany for distribution in Europe and the United States. *If you have a special imprint car, and it does not have a tiny ‘m’ printed on it then it is an Industry Print.
