With pen in hand and his wife standing over his shoulder, the auction-goer listened carefully and intently as the dolls were bidded on and bought. He jotted down the price of each of the 500 dolls on a list he had propped on a notebook in his hand.
Smartly, he had downloaded the 25-page catalog (actually, single sheets of paper) from the auction house’s website rather than paying $5 on-site for it. I opted not to buy it, too; most auction houses I go to give out the copies for free.
I sat two chairs away from the man at a doll auction in Lancaster, PA, about 1 ½ hours outside Philadelphia, last weekend. The auction was not taking online or phone bids – where the prices tended to be higher – so I thought I’d be able to pick up a few dolls for a few bucks.
Without a list, though, I was at a loss because the auctioneer did not announce the names of the dolls or their makers, but their numbers. That worked out well for the pace of the auction, moving it along quickly and smoothly in a room that felt more hot inside than it actually was outside. Several huge fans fought mightily to cool the big open space but they couldn’t beat the heat.
I was late arriving at the sale, so I wasn’t able to examine each doll as carefully as I usually do. So, I slyly looked at the man’s catalog sheet each time an auction staffer held up a doll that piqued my interest. The man obligingly encouraged my peeking, frequently sliding the sheet towards me so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck.
I wasn’t sure why he was meticulously recording the winning bids. I’d been at auctions before where consigners kept a record of the sale of their stuff. Did he own any of the dolls?
He was not a consigner, I learned, but someone who had dolls at home. (“You wouldn’t see me doing that,” he said out loud at one point. I looked up and saw a man in the row in front of us messing with the clothes on a Raggedy Ann doll. That man and his wife had bought a ton of dolls and accessories.)
This man’s dolls at home had actually belonged to his wife’s grandmother who had left them to her mother and her mother to her. The husband seemed to have limited knowledge about dolls, so he was here to figure out how much theirs may be worth. They were considering selling them. As the dolls were held up at the auction, he pointed out several that he recognized.
He was spending four hours on a Saturday doing what most of us should be doing: determining the value of our stuff. In this case, it was an actual collection, but many of us have items in our homes that should be given the same attention.
Although the prices at this auction were low, they were good for showing him the minimum that most of his dolls could go far. People go to auctions like this to get items at a bargain, knowing that they would be resold later for much higher prices.
The highest doll sold (as I recall) was a Kathy Kruse doll – a new name for me – that went for about $500. A few top German bisque head dolls fetched between $100 and $200, and many others sold – singly and in lots – for less than $100. A surprising number of the dolls were made of papier mache, according to the catalog sheets.
Most of us don’t bother to catalog the stuff in our homes. I’ve been at only one other auction where an owner actually did. She was an architect-teacher who tagged her pieces – noting where she got them, how much she paid for them and photographing them. Then she put the information in a binder.
The rest of us are likely closer to the woman who contacted me after reading one of my blog posts about Olmec dolls. Olmec was an African American company that made dolls in the 1980s and 1990s. The woman was searching for Sun Man, the company’s first action hero. She was a collector of African American dolls, and made presentations to children on the dolls and their history.
How many dolls do you have? I asked her. She didn’t know; she had ID tags on their bodies but no written list. All were still in their original boxes, she said, and she didn’t take them out unless she was using them in a presentation. Her dolls went back to the 1800s, she added, from Africa.
It sounded like an amazing collection, but she didn’t seem to have anyone to leave the dolls to. She wanted her granddaughter to have them, but the girl had no interest in the collection, she said.
I urged her to catalog the dolls, research their value and decide how she wanted them dispersed. Otherwise, that valuable collection could end up scattered here and there, and her years of collecting forgotten and lost.
