My Dolly's Home, by Doris Davey (book)

Exhibit
My Dolly's Home, by Doris Davey (book) (i)
location:
Arch Two , Area 19 Antique and Vintage Dollhouse Miniatures (display) 1920

Cover page [image info]

My Dolly's Home is a classic children's picture book by Doris Davey (after Helen Waite), published in around 1920-1921.

Front cover of "My Dolly's Home, by Doris Davey

About the book

The book is hardback and landscape-format, and on opening it turns out to give a tour through a "virtual" doll's house, through a sequence of rooms and gardens. The "reader" is enticed to explore, moving from room to room by opening hinged doors and gates, which lets them peer from one scene to another before turning the page.

Each double-page spread is a new scene, illustrated with hand-stippled shading by the illustrator Margarethe Stannard, and as well as opening doors, many of the rooms contain opening cupboards and other little corners to explore.

A pocket at the back of the book contains a set of little paper figures that can be used to populate or explore the book, along with some accessories such as umbrellas that can be left lying around or put into the cupboards.

The overall effect is that the book acts as a sort of dollhouse.

Use in the display

As well as putting our copy of the book in the cabinet, we adapted a number of its illustrations as backdrops for the six room spaces at the sides of the display space.

This involved editing and redrawing sections of the book's "room" images to get them to fit the wider proportions of the rooms.

External links

• My Dolly's Home, Toronto Public Library (torontopubliclibrary.ca)