Anchor Stone Building Sets DS 9 and DS 9A How to Build a Pavilion from Anchor Stones

The sets were created by the German aviation pioneers Gustav und Otto Lilienthal, who experimented with quartz sand, chalk, pigments, and linseed oil. They pressed these materials into standardized and combinable blocks. The red ones were for roofing tiles, the yellow ones for sandstone, and the blue ones for slate, just like real houses in Germany at the time. Their vision: a learning game that allowed children to discover the basics of architecture and structural engineering.
In 1880, the brothers sold their invention to the entrepreneur Friedrich Adolf Richter. To produce the stone building sets, he expanded his company in Rudolstadt, Thuringia. Add-on sets were available to expand sets from the same series. For this purpose, the sets were given keywords. For example: Basic Set 9 from the roofing tiles series had the keyword "Erpel." This helped the retailer find the corresponding add-on set. In this case, it was the set no. 9A, which had the keyword "Herne". This principle helped make the set a bestseller and paved the way to future popular construction toys such as Lego.

left
Anchor Stone Building Blocks Kit, roof tile series No. 9
H 125 x W 380 x D 260 mm
11.22 kg

right
Anchor Stone Building Blocks Kit, roof tile series No. 9A
H 50 x W 355 x D 235 mm
2.96 kg

Incomplete construction of the pavilion from "Richter's Bauvorlagen Nr. 7", page 1, figure 2, using the blueprints from "Des kleinen Baumeisters Hilfsbuch", order number 253, DS 7, page 2–3.