When did Lego stop putting small catalogs into boxes?

Question

In former times, all Lego sets used to come with a small catalog. This was either just a single leaflet with an overview of several themes (with a focus on new sets or subthemes), found in smaller sets, or a small booklet like a smaller version of the main catalog, just restricted to "minifig size" sets (when buying one of those minifig sized sets) and usually without any product descriptions (just set numbers), included in larger sets.

Personal nostalgia anecdote: These catalogs were significant to me as a child because they would often grant the first glimpse at new sets of the upcoming year during the first few weeks of January before toy stores would get the first main catalogs.

Recently, I noticed that current sets do not include this kind of catalogs anymore. When did TLC change this habit?

Answer 1

To be fair, it is hard to tell and depending on definition you may even tell TLG has never stopped doing so. But it depends on the series.

Bricklink has a lot of catalogs in their item data base. Single leaflet catalogs are called "Mini" and small booklet ones are called "Medium". Catalogs you can find in store are called "Large".

While Bricklink's database can be considered the largest in terms of catalogs they have, for some reason they didn't record if any of these catalogs come in sets. So it is hard to say when/if did TLG stop including Mini and Medium catalogs. Looking at the data recorded in Bricklink I would assume 1999-2001 are the years when TLG stopped putting "Medium" catalogs into System/City/Technic sets. It also depends which series you are interested in, since Duplo kept getting their "Medium" catalogs for much longer. However you can also find that some of recently introduced Dots sets may have had catalog of "Mini" type in their 2020 range.