By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn — I collect dolls. I’ve got 2,000 dolls crammed into a studio in New York City. Someone said, “There’s a doll named Blythe that looks a little like you.” So I bought one off eBay. I’m so in love with her. Then I started buying more and more until I had a hundred of them. I approached Hasbro about doing a book on her. They said: “We have no idea what you’re talking about. We don’t own that doll. We’ve never heard of her.” After I sent them some information on her, they said: “I guess we do own...

Antique Dolls, from Wood and Wax to Kewpie

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis — We have a very small team here at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, so we all have to do lots of different things. I don’t look after all the dolls, but I oversee the collections. I do the waxes and the woodens. I’ve got colleagues who are in charge of the cloth ones and the plastic ones and the porcelain ones and so on. I used to do all of it. When Caroline Goodfellow took early retirement about 10 or 11, years ago, I had to take on the whole doll collection as well as all my...