This Christmas, Buy The Best Person You Know A Bertolt Brecht Doll
I have to give credit to Devin, who discovered this glorious trove of wonders but generously allowed me to write about it, because I HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY!
Uneek Doll Designs is, without question, the single greatest shop on Etsy. Artist Debbie Ritter creates dolls of the most wonderfully specific characters, historical figures and celebrities, and their quizzical little faces and fastidious little outfits and puffy little nests of hair are all to die for.
But it's the breadth of her selection that really wows me. Ritter has 750 dolls for sale, most around $47. And the choices! There are your few pop culture picks you could buy anywhere else, like The Golden Girls or Wizard of Oz (or, less universally available, Susan Boyle). But most of these dolls are just made for nerds like you and me: literature nerds, history nerds, classical music nerds, philosophy nerds, science nerds. It takes a really specific person to covet a handmade Bertha Rochester doll, or Belle Watling doll, or Ogden Nash doll, and let me tell you, I am that person. I would also accept any of the rest of these.
I had such a time going through the hundreds of selections and narrowing them down even to the very many images we have in the below gallery; I would that I could include all of them, because every single one of these is a delight. Ritter also offers custom orders, so if you can think of a single human being, living or dead, fictional or real, that she hasn't already included in her shop, she can make it happen. (I've got one! Julia from Hellraiser, who is now my default subject for every custom order on Etsy.)
Your key to the gallery below:
Aldous Huxley
Ambrose Bierce
Anne of Bohemia
Belle Watling
Bertha Rochester
B.F. Skinner
Billie Holiday
Bertolt Brecht
Carl Sagan
Carole Lombard
Carson McCullers
Geoffrey Chaucer
Daphne du Maurier
Don Knotts
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Edith Piaf
ee cummings
Elmore Leonard
Ethelfleda of England
Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh
Fernando Pessoa
Flannery O'Conner
Francies Bavier
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
Frederick Douglass
Frida Kahlo
Friedrich Schiller
The Golden Girls
Grandma Gatewood
Johannes Gutenberg
Gwendolyn Brooks
Harper Lee
Igor Stravinsky
Isaac Newton
Ivan Pavlov
Jean Piaget
John Denver
Judy Blume
June Carter Cash
Karen Carpenter
Kurt Vonnegut
Angela Lansbury
Lawrence Welk
H.P. Lovecraft
Lucille Brown
Madame Curie
Margaret Atwood
Mary Lincoln Todd
Mary Whiton Calkins
Maurice Sendak
Maya Angelou
Melanie Wilkes
Muriel Spark
Vladimir Nabokov
Ogden Nash
Orson Welles
Peter Falk
Phyllis Diller
Marcel Proust
Thomas Pynchon
Scarlett O'Hara
Shel Silverstein
John Steinbeck
Susan Boyle
Sylvia Plath
Thomas Hardy
J.R.R. Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
Giuseppe Verdi
Voltaire
Wilkie Collins
Zelda Fitzgerald
Zora Neale Hurston
