Dolls not only capture little girls' hearts, they've also managed to corner markets for mega-companies like W.K. Kellogg Company, Jolly Green Giant, and Campbell's. The author has scoured flea markets and auction houses and consumed cereals, candies, and innumerable hamburgers in order to compile one of the most complete collections of advertising dolls known to exist. This comprehensive book traces the emergence of dolls like Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker, who leant their stamp of domestic credibility, and chronicles the extraordinary rise of figures like Ronald McDonald and the California...

This book recreates the ambiance of the ocean liner era by showing the actual objects used on board. Each piece of ocean-liner memorabilia is like an Aladdin's lamp, releasing wondrous memories of that grand style of travel. Beginning in the late 1890s, shipping lines forged their identities by commissioning unique furniture, china, silverware, glassware, vases, ashtrays, playing cards, menus, and stationery. These types of items characterized the different ocean liners, from the Normandie with her elegant Art Deco furnishings, to the stainless steel gleam of the S.S. United States, to the...

Judaica embraces those objects associated with the celebration of and adherence to Jewish rituals. This book presents clear explanations and beautiful color pictures of candlesticks, boxes, plates cups, toys, and foods which celebrate Jewish traditions. These objects of creative design display, honor and rekindle the spirit of a 5000-year-old religion to reflect 20th-century modernism.

Florida is the land of pink flamingos, bathing beauties, palm trees, coconuts, and beaches. It is a tourist mecca and a treasure trove of souvenirs. This book is a salute to the popular Florida tourist culture of the 1940s through the 1970s, when mostly northern tourists embraced the Florida sun and beaches with open arms, discovering along with Florida's natural beauty, a lot of kooky kitsch. Kitsch is colorful, funky, fun, and collectible. This book, with its 250 photos, remembers the nostalgic, whimsical objects often bought on impulse, brought home as gifts or mementos, and then relegated...

Since the turn of the century, the automobile has captured the imaginations not only of adults, but of children as well. As quickly as the new vehicles rolled off the assembly lines, foundries were making thousands of cast iron miniatures of the most popular automobiles, trucks, and farm equipment of the day. Today, rare and exquisite cast iron toys are coveted by collectors of all ages. This book presents a delightful, in-depth study of the marvelous products of leading American cast iron toy manufacturers, including Kenton, Dent, Hubley, Arcade, Kilgore, Vindex, and A. C. Williams, along...

This book takes you through hundreds of beautiful garden landscapes lavish with ornaments. A great variety of marble and stone walkways, garden walls, tiered fountains, statuary, classical architectural ruins, birdbaths, sundials, urns, garden furnishings, and iron gates are found, tucked away amidst lush plantings, European palaces, Italian villas, country manor houses, and elegant estates. See gardens of Italy, Texas, New England, Pennsylvania, New York, South Carolina, and Florida that are a feast for the eyes. This book will sow seeds for many gorgeous gardens of the future.

Florida is always associated with all that is bright, colorful, funky, and fun. This book captures the spirit of Florida in the collectibles, ephemera, souvenirs, and nostalgic items that it produced. There are also highlights of Florida history and its culture, a price guide, and an index. Complete with postcards, tablecloths, ceramics, clothing, jewelry, dolls, figurines, and much more, it celebrates the tourist culture that helped populate Florida from the 1900s through the 1970s. Over 650 photographs bring the fun and fantasy of Florida to life, presenting what many consider as truly...

In thousands of years of tilling the soil, we have created a great variety of garden tools to dig, cut scrub, harrow fields, and trim borders. What makes the tools unique, and collectible, is the way function has dictated form, resulting in not only ingenious shapes, but artistic ones. In the 19th and early 20th centuries garden tool catalogs listed hundreds of task-specific tools including dibbers, mattocks, potato hoes, onion hoes, daisy grubbers, claws, weeders, forcers, straighteners, garden row markers, garden reels, rakes, watering cans, water tanks, lawn mowers, lawn rollers, weed...