I’ve developed a little interest in doll-adjacent ephemera in the past month or two.
On October 22nd, Lyra and I went to the antique and craft show at the Champlain Valley fairgrounds. Lyra scored tons of Barbie stuff for reselling. I found this beautiful ~1860 double-sided paper doll and 2.5 of her outfits for just $10.00. Ultimately I want to restore her by adding feet and put her and outfits in a double-sided frame so I can admire front and back.
I got some early 1970s Mattel Barbie paper dolls off Craigslist. These were some bonus dolls [1971, I think] that I didn’t feel bad about cutting up to make the loudest, most matching outfits possible.Last month I discovered the world of chromolithograph ad trade cards. Companies printed millions of these, especially from the 1870s onward. The brilliantly rendered graphics were designed to entice people to collect them and paste them in scrapbooks, so the art often had very little to do with the products being sold. Here’s three of a six-card set showing a girl playing with her doll. I figure that these would be great decoration in my dolls’ playroom and my doll studio [whenever I get my own place]. The cards advertise Liebig’s Fleisch Extrakt, which is beef broth, a supposed source of curative properties.
Here are two from another six-card Liebig set. People in the Victorian era really loved their depictions of women, nature, women in nature, flowers, butterflies, fairy-like figures, etc. Usually the fairy-like figures are people with butterfly wings, but this set, which crosses women with beetles, goes into more unexpected territory. It’s odd, but cleverly done. This is a pretty popular set, so I paid kind of a lot for them. The ones with the girl and the doll were surprisingly cheap, though, so it all evens out.
