TheBlogOfThomasJ

All kinds of things are collectible — baseball cards, stamps, postcards, first editions of books, toy trains, action figures — but among the popular collectible toys are dolls. Anyone, regardless of age, can get into collecting.

However, many novice collectors often find themselves confused when it comes to determining the value of dolls. In collecting, a pristine doll may be worth only a few dollars, while an ugly looking Stretch Armstrong could actually worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Pricing can be a complicated process. For example, there are ones that have a high value because they were made in certain designs by certain companies. Then there are those that have low or no value at all. Mary is a stay-at-home mom learned about this when she put out a yard sale. She cleaned out several boxes of toys and dolls that had been up in her attic for years.

Mary had a friend who as into doll collecting. When she saw the ones that Mary was selling for less than a John Carter of Mars each, she immediately took the dolls off the tables and pulled Mary aside.

After the yard sale, Mary’s friend pointed out to her that one of the ugly ones she tried to sell earlier for under a dollar was worth at least a few hundred dollars. Mary never thought that they were that valuable. Later, Mary discovered that many are rare and are sought after by the serious collectors.

In the collecting world, looks can be deceiving. In Mary’s case, she thought the ugly ones she had were fit for the garbage bin. She initially thought to throw them away but then later decided to sell them cheap. She thought perhaps someone may be interested in the old dolls and wouldn’t mind fixing them up.

Mary did sell one of her dolls during the yard sale. She sold it right before her friend strode in and discovered them. She sold one of the vintage dolls to a man who was into collecting. He owned several, but he told Mary he wasn’t really in the collecting business.

Thanks to her friend, Mary was able to save many of them. She wouldn’t have known that they were valuable. Soon after the yard sale, Mary started her quest of finding information on them. She did some research on how to identify which dolls have high value and which are less or no value.

Local book shops are some of the good places to find information. However, buying books can be expensive, particularly if the books only have very little or worse, no information about certain dolls. Libraries are inexpensive options, but going from one library to the next and browsing through books can take up a lot of time. Besides, you’ll likely have to visit several libraries since no one library has all the books on dolls that you need.

The best and least inexpensive place to find information on dolls is the Internet. Do a simple Google search using the phrase “ dolls” and you’ll have thousands of results. It can still be a bit time consuming to wade through the search results, but it’s much easier to click than to drive and pore through books. When you finally have enough knowledge , you may even want to look into selling a few of them in your collection and make some money.

Visit www.zebraavenue.com/Zebra Avenue for more great information about a wide variety of topics.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.