Book Alert: Mattel – 75 Years of Innovation and Play (Assouline) |

"Logic will get you from A to B," Albert Einstein once remarked. "Imagination will take you everywhere." That's the best quote to describe the life of Ruth and Elliot Handler, Mattel founders.

A recently published volume by Assouline celebrates the 75th anniversary of the toy company, doing so via archival and modern images and starting from the early beginnings.

Children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Ruth and Elliot Handler married in 1938 and first started producing and selling interior design pieces, doll furniture and costume jewellery (under the banner of Elzac, a company formed with LA-based jeweller Zachary Zemby) designed by Elliot and made employing Lucite, a material that fascinated him. By 1945 the couple, together with friend Harold "Matt" Matson, had settled on the name Mattel (a combination of the names Matt and Elliot) and had launched into a completely new adventure in the toy world that started in a converted garage.

The first bestseller toy was a molded plastic ukulele that debuted in 1947, but the company acquired prestige and fame after releasing a Mickey Mouse Club Guitar in the mid-'50s and sponsoring a segment of The Mickey Mouse Club TV show.

Though the company received a natural boost in sales, its big break in the industry arrived only a few years later, in 1959, when Mattel released the Barbie doll in her iconic black and white Op Art swimsuit. Directly inspired by Ruth and Elliot's daughter Barbara, the doll didn't actually follow fashion, "We just tried to anticipate what the fashions were going to be by the time the product came on the market," explained Ruth, who enlisted at the time Chouinard Art Institute alum Charlotte Johnson to design Barbie's outfits and Japanese manufacturer Kokusai Boeki to oversee production.

By 1960 Mattel was a publicly traded company and five years later it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. More successes arrived with the Chatty Cathy doll, See 'n Say The farmer Says (a favourite not just with kids, but also with musicians who often sampled its animal noises – see for example artist and songwriter Daniel Johnston), Hot Wheels and the Masters of the Universe series not to mention the bestseller Tickle Me Elmo and more recent successes such as the Monster High dolls.

Mattel: 75 Years of Innovation and Play is an ideal volume for Barbie fans: it features quite a few pictures of the doll, plus quotes by designers including Cynthia Rowley, Patricia Field and Jeremy Scott (obviously Barbie and Moschino get a mention…) about being influenced in their career choices by dressing and undressing Barbies and creating exclusive outfits for the dolls.

Fashionistas will also cherish some of the pictures included in the volume, like the one portraying Twiggy and her doll, produced by Mattel in 1967 when the model was just 17, or images of celebrity Barbies commemorating famous TV shows such as the I Love Lucy series. Costume design fans will instead favour Bob Mackie's special Barbies or the Barbie Fashion Model Collection, celebrating Haute Couture and featuring dolls dressed in rich fabrics and costumes. There is something for everybody who ever owned a Mattel toy in this volume – from images of colourful Hot Wheels cars to the original box of the annoyingly noisy, but highly addictive Auto Race, a portable electronic game released in 1976 that drove many grown-ups to desperation with its beeping sounds.

Shame there are no photographs of the Mattel knitting and sewing machines: some readers may have indeed wanted to remember of a time when they enjoyed making things and stitched garments for their dolls with "an amazing new liquid bonding process" (the miracle stitch was actually just a glue gun, but it introduced children to patterns, fabric and decorations).

The volume briefly goes through acquisitions, mergers and philanthropic work, and closes with one of the latest products, Hello Barbie, that leverages WiFi and speech recognition technology.

Dedicated to all those grown-ups who owned a favourite Mattel toy as children, but also to graphic designers who love looking at vintage toy images and adverts, to marketing students who would like to learn more about early advertising techniques and slogans (such as "You can tell it's Mattel – it's swell!") and to all those people who, like Ruth and Elliot, believe there's no limit to imagination.