By Ben Marks — Growing up near San Francisco in the 1960s, my earliest memories of kokeshi dolls were of the kitschy souvenirs sold at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, as well as the orderly rows of identical, limbless wooden figures that lined the shelves of the tourist-trap gift shops at Fisherman’s Wharf. To my American-boy mind, kokeshi dolls held little interest, mostly because their delicately painted, rigid cylindrical forms seemed ill-suited to one of my favorite forms of childhood...

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...