Doll Eye Candy, or Doll Porn—

Doll Eye Candy, or Doll Porn—

We collectors love picture books, big lovely coffee table books of dolls like Carl Fox’s The Doll, or Manfred Bachmann’s Dolls the Wide World Over.  Then, there are the books my Marco Tosca, Lydia Richter, Gwen White, John Noble, and others, names from doll collecting past, to be sure.

What’s missing from these lavish photo studies are prices. They are not price guides.  Thy are histories, similar to the books on dolls and puppets by Max von Boehn and Professor Kenneth Gross.  Others scholarly works on collecting include The Collector’s Voice series by Susan Pearce.

It’s wonderful when books on dolls and related objects contain wonderful pictures and great text, but as a scholar and life-collector, I prefer the text.  Our obsession with photos has turned into doll porn.

By doll porn, I don’t mean dolls created for erotic purposes.  They are a whole other study, and this is a family friendly blog.  I mean that over the years, I’ve found editors of all types only want pictures, not history or text.  We want to zoom in on doll marks and mold numbers; we’ve analyzed the dolls to death by their parts, and can’t put them back together. As one of my good friends, Mary Hillier once observed to me, doll folk aren’t always much for reading.

We don’t use photo studies any more to identify dolls as we did with the brochures Seeley Molds and Doll Crafter used to publish.  We are more interested in investment, and price. We also don’t like to read.  We are obsessed with pictures, and not with interpreting them.  So, we have doll porn, which describes the knee jerk reaction we have to big splashy photos of dolls. 

Doll porn also makes us doll snobs.  We have lots of comments on how a do is dressed, its wig, its condition, the doll itself.  In the immortal words of Sly Stone, different strokes for different folks.  Or else, different dolls for different doll collecting folks.

 Words paint pictures, too, and words on dolls can be eloquent and historical.  My first doll books were more text than photo; I fell in love with the history behind dolls, and that led me to love all kinds of dolls.

I’d like to see more publications like Doll Talk or Clara Hallard Fawcett’s books, illustrated with small photos or drawings where appropriated, but with meaningful text.  Dolls are not subjects of material culture studies.  In general, we academics actually write, not just create picture books for grown-ups.

 

No one has to agree with me; but I feel the need to speak.  Doll collecting should not be a creepy habit, but a fun and educational pastime.  It should not just belong to those who can afford the big splashy photos in expensive catalogs featuring dolls that cost the price of someone’s house.

 

As Genevieve Angione wrote, All Dolls are Collectible.  Every doll’s picture tells a story.  Let’s read it, and study it.  Let’s not just drool over high prices and numbers incised on the back of a doll’s neck.