Thursday, September 27, 2007

Thursday Tab- Artcraft Campus Queens #1743, 1957




























Even as a child, I preferred Glamour Girl paper dolls to the little girls and babies (though I had plenty of those sets as well, and many in my collection). When I started collecting, I looked specifically for paperdolls that I had as a child, and Campus Queens is one of them. This book is a reprint of Campus Sweethearts #4430, which was published in 1957. My reprint (from Artcraft, which was affiliated with Saalfield) was probably published a few years later. I love the outfits in this set- so June Cleaver/Sorority Sister/Circle Pin. Take note of the *cheerleader atmosphere* of the set (with pennants and silhouettes on the cover, etc) and then note that there are no cheerleader outfits. This seemed to be a paper doll trend- I have several cheerleader sets from that era (some of them with Cheerleader in the title) that have no actual cheerleader clothes. A strange omission, I think.
Also odd is the division of clothes in this set- the brunette doll has more outfits than the blonde, and only she has a formal gown (usually, sets are pretty evenly divided as to number of clothes, and every doll had formal wear). A lot of space was used up for Blondie's jammies, while the brunette has to sleep in her swimsuit, I guess.
Oh- and if you do cut these out, ignore the little slits in the tabs. They don't actually hold the clothes on the doll, and they always tear.

As always, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image, then right click to save the image as a jpg if you want to print the pages out. Print the covers/dolls on cardstock if you want to cut them. You can use the bucket fill tool in any graphics program to whiten the background for printing, though check the page carefully before you print- sometimes the bucket tool will also whiten areas you don't want changed.

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