I’ve always coveted an elaborate dollhouse. Filling its rooms with miniature decorations would not only be a hobby, but a pleasure. The intricate interiors of D.C. librarian Faith Bradford’s 23-room dollhouse are enough to make me sweat a little. This artifact has lived at the Smithsonian Museum of National History for the last sixty years, and it (as well as its eccentric creator) is now the subject of a book written by famed curator and all around cool guy William L. Bird. The synopsis:
“On the museum’s third floor sits a five-story dollhouse donated to the museum by Faith Bradford, a Washington D.C. librarian, who spent more than a half-century accumulating and constructing the 1,354 miniatures that fill its 23 intricately detailed rooms. When Bradford donated them to the museum in 1951, she wrote a lengthy manuscript describing the lives of its residents: Mr. and Mrs. Peter Doll and their ten children, two visiting grandparents, twenty pets, and household staff. Bradford cataloged the Dolls’ tastes, habits, and preferences in neatly typed household inventories, which she then bound, along with photographs and fabric samples, in a scrapbook. She even sent museum curators holiday cards written by the Dolls.”
I can’t wait to rip through this book! Christmas list, you’re on. (And I couldn’t forget to mention The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, but that’s a post for another day.) Read more about the author’s intentions in this month’s Five Questions interview at Imprint.
Also! Check out Bird’s other work. He wrote a book on paint-by-numbers and the art of holiday display! Rad.
