How would one go about trying to get hold of some of those '100 dolls for a dollar'? What would you need to look up exactly? They're absolutely precious and I think I'm going to need more like 1000 of em!
That’s a really good question, since I’ve only ever seen them twice (once at a yardsale and I bought them, once at an antique store and I think there were only 25 in the box), but since they were advertised heavily in the 1950s and into the 1960s there have to be thousands available.
eBay has a set at this moment!!
I have to give the makers of 100 Dolls credit: they didn’t just focus on little white people, they were very eclectic in their offering. The ads may have mentioned “clown dolls, ballerina dolls”, etc., but they contained Little Bo Peep and cowgirls and vaqueros and Elizabethan dresses and several Asian cultures and flaminco dancers… they did a pretty good job of trying to be inclusive, which is unique for the time period, though I do not recall how many African dolls, European cultures, or other Latin Americans they contained.
Personal observation, which is reflected by the above auction box: You might get 100 dolls in a box but there will be duplicates of most of them. Usually 2, but sometimes 3-4. So if you had 1000 of the dolls, you’d have 20-25 of most figures… and likely 10 Santa Claus in his sleighs. :) I do not know how many unique figures there are so I can’t confirm that number to be 50 or more.
What I’ve always – and I do mean as long as I’ve been sentient – wondered… The 100 Dolls box was before my time, but when I was a small kid in the 1970s the comic books would have similar offerings of army figures (”100 in a footlocker”) and Roman centurions(!) and such, and I always was curious about them. I mean, now having seen the 100 Dolls I know that the soldiers had to be an inch or so tall, not like Little Green Army Men, to fit in a box the size of an adult palm (or two kid hands), but these sets I have never seen in person and yet they’re more recent than the 100 Dolls.
