HOBBY One purchase started her addiction to dolls
Gail Cook lovingly restores and cleans the pieces in her large collection.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DALLAS -- Sometimes just a taste of something can prove addictive.
In the case of Gail Cook, it was buying an antique doll for her daughter 25 years ago. From that purchase she caught the bug, and now she has hundreds of dolls in a world-class collection.
Some dance, some play music, some wear elaborate, delicate costumes. Baby dolls, adult dolls, even two overweight bathing beauties.
Selections from Cook's collection are on display at the DeGolyer House in the Dallas Arboretum through Feb. 29.
"It's a tremendous collection. There's no finer single collection in the world," says Stuart Holbrook of Theriault's, a doll auction house based in Annapolis, Md. "Every piece is hand-selected. This would be like an exhibition of some of the great impressionistic paintings in the world coming to Dallas."
Dolls are everyday objects that people can identify with, he says. "They symbolize everything in history," he says. "A doll, everyone can appreciate it."
Cook's collection focuses on German and French dolls from Victorian times, the heyday of ceramic dolls.
Selected dolls are being displayed in cases throughout the house.
Preservation
Cook has spared no effort to preserve her collection. At her home in Highland Park, Texas, they're displayed on either side of a 60-foot room in her home, in two long cases built by a company that constructs museum cases. The glass is extra-clear, the lighting is fiber optic so it won't fade the fabric, and there's no wood anywhere, because of its acidity.
"It's amazing that these lasted," Cook says. Between being played with by children and simply worn by time or moths, dolls can have a rough life.
Below the display cases are drawer after drawer, filled with shoes, buttons, hats, purses, umbrellas and so on, which she uses in restoring the dolls. She collects clothing from that era so that if she needs to sew an outfit for a doll, the fabric will be from the correct period.
"I've got books and books and books to show me exactly how they should be dressed," she says.
Two drawers contain only ribbons -- mainly first place and best in show -- from competitions she has won with the dolls. They're judged on rarity, originality and condition. She also judges contests when she's not competing.
"There's something really exciting to create something," she says. "Sometimes a doll comes to me, it doesn't look too good. It's dirty; it's a real pleasure to bring a doll back to life."
Cleaning methods
There are tricks to cleaning the dolls. She uses Efferdent denture cleaner to clean the clothes, and waterless soap from an auto-parts store to clean composition bodies.
"The faces, you can almost use Ajax on them because the color's baked onto them," she says.
The dolls come from sales and auctions. One hard-and-fast rule she has is she won't buy a doll if there's any damage to the bisque -- the ceramic portion. She sometimes travels with the dolls, and even a hairline crack can shatter the head if the doll is jostled.
She's constantly upgrading and trading, so she doesn't have that first doll any more. It was a nice doll, but it didn't have the character of the finer ones, she says.
Some of the dolls are mechanical. One of the largest is a magician wearing an elaborate dress, holding a magic wand and standing behind a velvet-topped table with two cups and a die on it.
Wind the doll up and she touches the wand to the items on the table, which lift to reveal a monkey, a clown and a little girl, all of which move.
Another pair of dolls waltzes, a clown does tricks, a little boy whistles, a hurdy-gurdy man winds his box and sets a smaller pair of dolls dancing. Two dolls, holding broken toys, throw tantrums. A videotape of the mechanical dolls moving will be shown in the house's dining room.
Other dolls -- made to look like full-grown women rather than children -- were used as fashion models. Dressmakers would send the dolls out to show off the latest fashions, and people could order based on the dolls.
There are even dolls that came with interchangeable heads, or heads that spin around to show two different faces -- one happy and one sad, in the case of one doll.
So, out of such a wide mix of dolls, which is her favorite?
"The favorite I have is usually the doll I'm working on," she says.