🚀 go-pugleaf

A friend just asked me this question, and by the time I gave her my ideas, I thought I 
could use more info from other people who know more than I do. 

My friend asked:

>I just recently bought a doll value book.  There is a picture of a group of
>dolls and toys on the front cover.  Inside the cover it has how much each
>item is worth.  There was one doll, a Bru that it said is worth $53,000.00.
>That's $53 thousand dollars!!  I had to look at the numbers a few times to 
>make sure I was reading this right.  How could this doll be worth that much?
>She is very cute, has a big grin on her face and pretty brown hair and a nice
>cute dress, but what would cause her to be worth so much?
>
>And why are these Bru dolls so special?

I said:

I, too, have a hard time understanding how any doll could be worth as much as a 
house, and have to invoke my old rule about the difference between "worth" and 
"financial value.

But then, I think of a snobbish friend of mine who was distressed at another friend 
who bought a tacky "sofa-size" painting, and her husband said, "At least she spent 
it on art instead of makeup!"  And that got me to realizing I was a snob, too, 
because I thought I was somehow better spending so much money on books when 
somebody else spent $3,000 on drapes.  A sobering thought I still struggle with.

Anyway, back to the point:

Doll value is basically how much someone is willing to pay.  People are willing to 
pay more for dolls that are

1.  Very beautiful.

2.  In great condition.

3.  Rare.

(I used to think there was a #4 = Old, but that's not really true.  Old, per se, doesn't 
add to the value except insofar as it impinges on the other three: our taste gives 
old things a higher #1, age makes #2 less likely, and thus adds to #3.)  Any one of 
these values isn't enough to make it have a lot of monetary value: I have a beloved 
ugly homemade doll that is #3 but neither of the others.  Having two of these 
generally makes a doll be moderately expensive, and all three makes it quite 
expensive.

Already in the late middle ages, German manufacturors were famous for making 
doll, and the export market brought a lot of money into the country.  Whole villages 
specialized in a particular part.  France was late coming into the scene, and 
although they had people who made cheap dolls, a few companies including Bru, 
concentrated on quality, making a few expensive dolls rather than trying to export 
lots of more cheaply made dolls.

In the heyday of the great porcelain dolls (about 1870 to about 1930), Germany 
made and exported a lot more dolls than France.  Although there are a few German 
companies that made very high-quality dolls, in general French dolls were already 
considered superior.  

So with the Bru you saw in the picture, you have a doll that is likely to be all three.  
Beautiful, in great condition (especially the clothes), and one of a kind that was 
very rare in the first place, and even fewer have survived.   Other dolls are also 
greatly treasured, but the quality of Bru, the perfect porcelain, the attention to 
detail, makes them super-special.  

I don't know the doll you saw, but there is another consideration that sometimes 
inflates a price further: having been owned by someone very famous or at least 
notorious.

And that's all I know.  Oh, one more thing: I've never liked them all that much in 
photographs, preferring the later character dolls, but when I finally saw one that 
wasn't even all that valuable, I saw an incredible delicacy in coloring that made me 
like it a lot more in person.

Hope this helps. 

Tish Lehman (pvl@umich.edu)