Thursday, September 6, 2007

Thursday Tab- Merrill Ballerina Dolls




This is the only uncut vintage Merrill paper doll that I own. Merrill was, quite rightly, the top of the line in paper dolls. Their artwork was superb and their subject matter wonderful (they did many many celebrity dolls). The Shackman company has chosen several Merrill sets for reproduction, which I think are still available, and I own most of them (I won't upload any of the repros). From cutting the repro books, and from the cut sets that I own, I can say that I don't think the Merrill clothes fit the dolls as well as some other publishers (Whitman in particular, was good about the clothes actually fitting- a bigger problem than you might imagine), but I can't deny that they're flat-out beautiful. This set was published in 1960, though my records say it was #1554, I can't find it under that number in my reference books, so I must have written it down wrong (the paper doll book itself is in storage, so I can't check).
P.S. I have a terrible time formatting the layout of these pages in posts. They look lined up nicely in the preview (2 or 3 paper doll pages to a line), but they get unarranged when I post. Sorry.
edited to add: My paper doll friend, Peggy Ell, tells me that this book is indeed #1554, but it is a reprint of #1542, originally called Little Ballerina. Thanks for clearing that up, Peggy.

1 comment:

barbarab said...

Thank you Kathi. I love it when you can click on the page and get a bigger picture to see the details. The colors are beautiful.
Barbara