Found a stack of my old instruction booklets and the kid on the back cover made me laugh

I did the same thing last spring when I helped my mum move out of the house I grew up in. Found a stack of booklets from around 2008, mostly City and a couple of the bigger Creator sets, and that same kid was staring back at me from the back covers. I'd completley forgotten he existed until that moment, then suddenly I could picture sitting on the living room carpet at eight years old, building while cartoons played in the background.

What got me was how the instructions themselves felt. The paper quality, the way the sets were photographed on those plain backgrounds, even the smell of the old glossy pages. My partner thougth I was strange for keeping them, but they went straight into a storage bin with the handful of minifigures I'd salvaged. I also tried one of the old survey web addresses out of curiosity and got bounced to some generic page that clearly had nothing to do with the original promotion. Funny how those little printed links felt like a big deal at the time, like you were acutally participating in something. Mine live in the loft now next to a tub of mixed bricks my nephew plays with when he visits. He has no interest in the booklets, he just builds freeform, but handing him pieces that came from those same sets felt pretty good.

Funny timing reading this, because my experience was the total inverse. When my childhood stuff came out of storage about three years ago, not a single booklet survived. My parents ran a holiday cottage business and I was left on my own a lot, so I built everything from the republic of mixed spare bricks in a couple of old biscuit tins. No boxes, no instructions, just whatever pieces happened to be in the tin that afternoon. That explains why I never got attached to the kid on the back covers. I genuinely had to look up who people were talking about when thisexact nostalgia thing comes up on forums now and then. Apparently he was on a few years of them, so folks a bit younger than me had a totally different emotional relationship with those booklets than I did.

What I will say is that the ones you kept are worth more than sentiment now. A friend of mine softens the creases by pressing booklets under a stack of heavy books for a week, then slips each one into an A4 plastic sleeve. He sold a couple from the early 2000s last year and got decent money for them, more than the sets themselves would fetch in that condition.

I ended up buying one used set from that era myself, just to follow the steps once like everyone else did. Felt a bit like eating a birthday cake that was never mine.

That plaid shirt lad goes back further than you two reckon, I've got mid-2000s booklets with him on the back and I'd swear he showed up before that too. Back in my day you didn't get survey links, you got a coupon slip to cut out and post off, and you waited six weeks to hear nothing. Still, I get the pull. My old booklets live in the garage in a biscuit tin with the punched holes where I used to file them in a ring binder like a proper nerd. Does anyone else remember covering the builds with a tea towel so you could only see the next step? None of this peaking ahead nonsense.

I've still got one 2012 City booklet that survived my declutter a few years back, and its back cover is the odd one in the bunch, no blond kid at all, just a plain mail-in offer for a poster. Remember being vaguely disappointed as a kid, like the set itself was somehow lesser for it. My theory at the time was that he only turned up on the bigger sets, though I never properly checked whether that pattern held. Might dig the rest out of the garage this weekend and actually test it, which is probably the most pedantic reason anyone has ever had for rereading a stack of building instructions.