A doll collector recently visited our PattycakeDoll black collectible dolls page and then sent us this question:
“What doll magazines or books would you recommend to a collector who collects African American Dolls?”
“What a great question!”, I thought, and then realized, “I don’t have a good answer.”
IMHO there are really only four magazines that cover the industry well; they are: Contemporary Doll Collector, Dolls, The Doll Reader, and Art Doll Quarterly. And none of them do a particularly good job of addressing this market.
After all, it’s not like nobody makes these dolls… ‘Jamaica” above, is from Lee Middleton, who has a pretty good mix of Asian, Black and Hispanic Dolls. So does Berenguer and Precious Moments, Adora Doll and even Corolle. Marie Osmand does not, nor does Madame Alexander nor the OOAK and limited edition folks.
In fact the whole success of my two sites PattycakeDoll.com and SleepySoft.com has been built around supplying this market with ethnic baby dolls and ethnic collectible dolls.
But I expect that things will change, and pretty quickly I expect… After all more than 50% of the babies born in th US are ‘non-white.’ And of course about half of those are girls. The industry will wise up eventually, and then who knows? Maybe there will even be a Magazine called “Black Doll Collector!”