A CITY OF DOLL MAKERS.

Evening Post, Volume XLIX, Issue 16, 19 January 1895, Page 2 (Supplement)

A CITY OF DOLL MAKERS.

At' Sonneberg, which, is in the heart of Germany, all the inhabitants are in the business of doll-mak-ing — twelve thousand people are all more or less doll-makers — and among them they produce no less than twenty-five million dozen doll-babies every year. It is hard to realise what an immense quantity that !b. After this it sounds odd to say that in Sonneberg it takes eighty persons to make a doll. Yet such is the fact. In Germany labouri s sub-dividedtiß much as possible, "or in other words, a doll-maker does 'one little thing from year's end to year's end, and thus it comes about 'that it takes eighty persons to make a doll. , Little boys, when they enter the Sonneberg factories, spend a long time in painting nails on dolls' fingers,' for which they are paid about twenty-five cents a week.; Some , girls do nothing but fill bodies with chopped hay or straw. Men pass their lives in painting dollys' lasbes and brows, and others in putting rouge on her cheeks. So it is with other parts of a doll; each -is done by one person. The dolls' wigs are made by girls at Munich, and their eyes come from a little town only a few miles from -Sonneberg, and are made by men in their < own homes. ■ Endless are the, varieties of dolls. Every Sonneberg manufacturer has about one hundred designs.- Taste varies, and besides, in exporting dolls many things have to be taken into consideration. A wax one cannot be sent to a very hot or very cold country. In the former it would melt, in the latter crack. Then if the doll has rubber joints she cannot be sent on a long sea, voyage, for on her arrival at her destination she would be armless and legless. A sea journey also takes the curl out of dolly's hair, and the, starch out of her. clothes. Fashion, moreover, is constantly changing. A doll which everybody hays one season is not looked at the next.