Dollhouses.(The Small World of Antique Dolls' Houses)(Book review)

Flora Gill Jacobs began collecting dollhouses in 1945, and soon thereafter she started writing books about them. In 1975 she established the Washington Dolls' House and Toy Museum in Washington, D. C., which functioned until 2004, when, at the age of eighty-five, she closed the museum and sold the collection at auction. The present book, The Small World of Antique Dolls' Houses, is a grand summary of her long experience in the field. She writes in a breezy style as if to her friends, which is fine, since the dollhouse world is small, and many of her readers will be friends. Other readers will soon feel they know her as well, so engaging is the stream of consciousness that carries her along.

It seems that everything large has been miniaturized at one time or another. The ten chapters in this book treat American houses both handmade and commercially made, English houses, European houses, and then kitchens, plumbing, a dentist's office, shops, churches, stables, zoos, a houseboat, and a Mexican mansion, among other specialized habitations. Jacobs dedicates her work to the five cats who have succeeded each other in her life, all apparently reverentially careful to play in but not destroy the dollhouses. As proof there is a surrealistic photograph of a velvety cat named Annie daintily filling the parlor of one of the American houses.

The collector's first house is known as the South Jersey Mansion for the location of the barn in which it was found half buried. It is a nineteenth-century chocolate brown house with a mansard roof and eight rooms. The author recalls that it was "a diminutive version of such faded relics now usually to be seen on the wrong side of the tracks." The floors were warped and not a shred of drapery remained. The house embodies two familiar problems for dollhouse collectors--bare rooms and the absence of a provenance. Jacobs scrounged furnishings over the years and added a bathroom--"a rash addition, I might, in more mature years, have resisted." She and other dollhouse collectors are as intent on authenticity as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has used some of the Washington Dolls' House Museum's displays on their Christmas cards. The bond is close, for as Jacobs writes, "If this collector sees an object in miniature, she tends to want it in full-size. If she has it in full-size, she tends to want it in miniature."

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And miniature is not a concept to be underestimated. To furnish a cottage made of a Minnesota packing crate, Jacobs found a teaset so tiny it was shipped from France in a large capsule. In the house it joined a rare indiscrete, a three-seat sofa on which each tiny person sits with his back to the others. One of the houses issued by the National Trust as ...