Anri Wooden Collegiate Mascots

The ANRI company, located in the Alps of Northern Italy, specializes in hand-carved wooden items including collegiate mascots. Although the company still makes wooden carvings, they have not produced collegiate mascots in the last 30-40 years due to the stricter enforcement of copyright laws.

Founded in 1912, the company has a rich heritage, and as you would expect from hand-crafted Italian objects, they are very high quality.

A close-up of the colorful University of Illinois Illiniwek mascot

ANRI made wooden mascot for scores of schools including the University of Michigan, Princeton, Yale, Tulane, Columbia, Cornell, Penn State, NYU and Lehigh. ANRI collegiate mascots are often confused with those made in the United States by Carter Hoffman. Hoffman’s mascots are almost always stamped with the company name on the bottom, the ANRI mascots are unmarked.

Like each of us, ANRI mascots were done in all shapes and sizes. Typically they are five or six inches in height, although they were also done in miniature versions, as shown in the cute Columbia lion mascot below, which is two inches from end-to end.

A Columbia University lion wooden ANRI mascot

ANRI also produced other wooden accessories associated with colleges and universities, most notably letter openers.  A University of Michigan wolverine letter opener is pictured below:

ANRI carved items are sought after by collectors and alumni and are a nostalgic piece of ephemera from the glory days of collegiate life. We have a nice collection of ANRI and Carter Hoffman collectibles on our website:

Website of Collectableivy.com

The Ivy League Police Lineup – John Harvard

Suspect #1 please step forward and say out loud “VE RI TAS!”

These John Harvard wooden mascot figures were produced in the 1950s by Carter Hoffman. We thought that putting them into a lineup would be a good way to illustrate that each figure is a little bit different. Since each figure was hand carved and painted this is not altogether surprising. Look closely and you will see that the eyes vary quite a bit. Some are looking up, some down and some sideways.

Note that the collars are of different styles, as are the mouths, noses, hats and letters. Their happy smiling faces pictured from above are seen below!

 The Yale Bulldogs below don’t look so much like a police lineup as they do a dogsled race lineup. The same comments apply, there is quite a bit of variation in the wooden figures produced for Yale’s mascot.

We occasionally have Carter Hoffman figures available on our website:

www.collectableivy.com

Carter Hoffman Wooden Collegiate Mascots

Carter Hoffman mascots are listed for sale inside the front cover of this 1954 Ivy League football program.

Hoffman was a well-known artist from Los Angeles who made these hand carved mascots for various Ivy League and other colleges in the 1950s. Hoffman also did some mascots for professional sports teams and even some lesser know and more obscure schools. Sold under the name “Carter Hoffman Artcraft” they have become highly collectible. A brochure from the 1950s lists over 120 different schools that they made mascots for.

The mascots are also featured on this Yale-Uconn 1952 program cover. The mascots were available in two sizes, the normal size (catalog item #7) and larger size, called jumbo (listed in the catalog as #8).

The rare Princeton tiger mascot seen above

The now defunct Dartmouth Indian mascot from the 1950s

The company also made bottle pour spouts which replace a cork that has been pulled. The bottles contain the school mascot on the top.

The John Harvard bottle pour stop mascot, above and statue below.

The mascots were produced with two marking on the bottom. One was the name of the mascot. In the example below, it shows the “Dartmouth Indian”. Because these were paper labels, often they are now missing. The other marking is stamped in black ink “Carter Hoffman Original.”

Two pages from an original Carter Hoffman catalog are seen below, showing the location of the business in Glendale, California. The mascots and wine stoppers sold for $24 a dozen wholesale, the jumbo mascots for $7.50 each.

Carter Hoffman items are sought after by collectors and are difficult to find. There is an active market for them. We occasionally have some in inventory on our website:

website of collectableivy.com

Credit to insidetheparkcollectibles on the history of these rare collectibles.