Art deco collectibles were in the news this week when a couple sold off their collection of art deco furniture and art for a record amount at Christie’s auction house in Paris.

The term art deco was coined in the 1960s to refer to the design style popular between World War I and World War II. Although the style began prior to this period and extended afterward, the time between the wars was its heyday. The art deco style was named for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which was held in 1925 in Paris and featured a variety of works in that style. Although Paris was the birthplace of art deco style, it soon found its way to the United States, where it was eagerly adopted.

The style was sophisticated and luxurious, influenced by a number of trends including jazz, the machine age, King Tut’s tomb, travel, South America, Africa, skyscrapers, the Ballets Russes, and art movements like Cubism, Fauvism and Post-Impressionism. Art deco design was known for its clean lines and geometric shapes. Common motifs included abstract sunburst and floral shapes, curves and zigzags. There was a focus on high quality, with superior materials used to execute the designs.

Art deco style was used to create many decorative arts items, such as jewelry, textiles, furniture, sculpture, tableware and more. From teapots to earrings, art deco could be seen everywhere. Some of the leading artists of the era were furniture designer Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, metalworkers Charles Christofle and Jean Puiforcat, glass designer Rene Lalique, fashion designer Paul Poiret and metalworker Jean Puiforcat.

Art deco design was frequently used in architecture and many structures built in the art deco style survive to this day. Radio City Music Hall and the Chrysler Building in New York are two excellent examples. Also, the city of Miami is known for its many stunning art deco buildings.

Not just any ordinary doll, but a glamorous 15.5 inch doll with all the allure of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Her name is Gene Marshall.

The Gene Marshall Collection is inspired by the classic movie stars of the ’30’s,’40s, and ’50s. Gene herself has a backstory which covers her discovery and Hollywood transformation, as well as a continuing saga of each movie she starred in as well as her own personal life. Each Gene doll, every ensemble, piece of furniture or other accessory comes with its own booklet that gives you another part of Gene’s story. Each booklet not only continues the saga of Gene, but reminds classic film fans of past icons and films… Here’s a tribute to Monroe, there a reminder of Tierney, and another of Crawford or Bergman…

Each doll wears stunning recreations of the clothes and accessories of this fabulous bygone era. Outfits have luscious fabrics, are lavishingly hand beading. The dresses are fully lined and the sheer stockings have seams running up the backs. These details all add to the collection’s nostalgic appeal.

As collectors - men and women alike — we ate up the nostalgia, her beauty, and the ongoing romantic storyline. This includes the additions of other character dolls, such as her rival Madra Lord, African-American singer Violet Waters, and leading man Trent Osborn. The collection grows, but it always remains focused on the details of the dolls, garments and storyline.

Who delivered such a captivating concoction?

She was created by renowned artist and erotically charged illustrator Mel Odom. Yes, a former artist for Playboy, Viva and Blueboy in the 70’s and 80’screated this doll of the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and New Look 60’s.

Gene’s sex appeal cannot be denied, but the true magic lies in Odom’s imagination to create a sense of time, a feeling of Hollywood Glamour based on the personality of an actress. We flocked to Gene as if she was truly a celebrity we could reach out and touch. Not since Barbie has a doll had such a history or inspired such buyer passions.

When Odom began with Gene, he was swimming upstream to convince the doll world there was room for Gene. In 1995 when Gene debuted at Toy Fair, with just three dressed dolls and nine costumes, nobody much thought she’d be around the next year. Luckily, Ashton-Drake saw the potential. Before Gene, the traditional method in Ashton Drake’s doll selling was to generate a fast turnover of high quality yet reasonably priced limited-edition baby and children-type dolls. Until Mel Odom and Gene there was never any one signature fashion doll. But 10 years later, she’s changed the course of fashion doll history and the adult collectors doll market.

Gene has spawned a large-sized collectible doll market. Even Barbie, as popular as she was/is, had not started such a frenzy in the minds of collecting adults — but Babs has benefitted by the renewed interest collectors have in fashion dolls. Gene remains the longest-reigning large-sized collectible fashion doll.

Gene is not just a doll, or even just a collectible. She’s a phenomenon.

Combining the collector’s passion for glamour with romantic notions, we bought the dolls, joined the fan clubs, bought more dolls — and the accessories, attended conventions, created fan pages online, and drove the secondary market prices up.

Spurred on by Mel’s philosophy that Gene was not to sit unloved in a box for a greater ’someday’ payoff (he’s repeatedly bemoaned those who buy her and keep her in a box — as a star, she’s to be admired!), we did more than just display and adore her. We not only took her out of the box, we redressed her and created little vignettes of our own, posing her with her props and furthering the stories, even making our own.

Next, we let our fantasies take hold and took complete ownership of her.

We collectors began our own cottage artisan activities. Inspired by Gene’s world and fashions, not to mention a larger size which makes sewing easier, we made our own outfits and jewelry. We changed her hair (everything from wigs to perms, coloring it, and rerooting it (eyelashes too!). We even repainted her face.

Suddenly we felt empowered to create costumes as wonderful as Edith Head, turn out more glamorous stars than MGM, and even create our own Gene Gossip. Even our own artisan makeovers of Gene were selling like crazy, for hundreds of dollars, at online auctions at at conventions.

Our crafty ways and lust for vintage fashion was not unnoticed. Vogue Patterns introduced Gene-sized couture fashion patterns in 1999, and the patterns were at least then their number one and number two best sellers. Even Ashton Drake fueled us on with their Young Designers of America Competition, giving winners opportunities to sign contracts with Ashton-Drake and to receive royalty payments on their designs for outfits that were released as part of the Gene line.

All this creativity put an additional crimp in finding original Gene dolls and outfits. (This will have an especially large impact on limited editions as the years pass by.) But most of us did not concern ourselves, as we were enjoying Gene and her world wholeheartedly. Since then, this custom creation has spawned a similar custom craze with other fashion dolls and their collectors.

In November, 2005, admist months of swirling rumors of a change, at the 10th Anniversary Gene Doll Convention in Stamford, Connecticut, Don Vaccarello, Vice President of Ashton-Drake Galleries announced that The Ashton-Drake Galleries would no longer produce new Gene dolls, nor outfits, beginning in 2006. Many of us applauded what we hoped would be even more control and imaginative releases of The Gene Marshall Collection. After all, he did give birth to her and has carefully tried to preserve the integrity of Gene’s story. But we are still waiting to see…

In Summer 2006, we have seen no new releases of Gene. We do know that Mel’s own studio, Star Blue Studios, has contracted with Jason Wu for the manufacturing and distributing of the new Gene. The new Gene website, GeneMarshallDoll.com, and this interview with Mel Odom offer a little insight into our beloved Gene. Apparently only 6 dolls will be released this year, and only 25 Gene dealers have been accepted worldwide, and photos are few. Here are the few I’ve seen:

I eagerly await more news and the presentation of the dolls and the stories themselves.

Photos © Jason Wu, LLC and Star Blue Studios Inc.

For many years, I’ve been collecting tiny superheroes and sending them remorselessly into battle. It’s not that I don’t love them, but on Wednesday nights, we’d dust the crumbs off of the dorm room floor, put on some Queens of the Stone Age and beat the (virtual) living heck out of each other. Using powers like telekinesis, super-strength, and a super-heroic willpower, we’d have a hell of a time.

With 1.5” inch high superhero figures, feet conveniently glued to dials that contained statistics about their powers, we’d traverse a small map and try to strategies our way towards our survival and the destruction of our enemy. Anyone who’s ever participated in wargaming knows what I’m talking about, but wargaming has always seemed so forbidding, with its rulers and handmade battle terrain and math and general uber-nerdness - so us lesser nerds (species : Dorkinus Minimus) turned to Heroclix, a collectible miniature game by WizKids, which serves as a fair introduction to the much larger culture of miniature gaming.

It’s appeal? Well, within the game of Heroclix, there are hundreds upon hundreds of superheroes and villains to collect and send into battle. Each has their own unique appearance and battle statistics, and you can intermingle characters from both the DC and Marvel comics universes, with a fair smattering of other publishers thrown in there also. Best of all, there’s none of that complicated pencil-and-paper gaming going on. All of the statistics you need for each character are contained in a simple system of numbers and symbols on their individual dials. With the roll of some dice, your battles are waged and won. It’s really quite ingenious, and it was totally addictive to a comic nerd who wanted to see who would win in a fight between Captain America and Batman. The game is complex enough to be interesting and simple enough to be absorbing.

In seventeen days from today, the 17th Heroclix expansion set will be released. Every handful of months since the initial Heroclix offering in 2002, WizKids has set forth a new, large set of characters to be added to your epic battles across imaginary cityscapes. These are released in mystery packs containing three or four figures each, and in every few packs, you have the chance of getting a rare ‘Unique’ figure, representing a powerful or briefly-seen incarnation of a character that might be just too unusual to include in the main set of characters. While being effective game pieces, they’re also very tradable and can fetch high prices. Think of them as three dimensional trading cards.

With this new expansion, called ‘Sinister’, WizKids is focusing on completing the lexicon of Spider-Man villains, tying in with the release of the third Spider-Man movie. While we’ve had folks like Venom and Green Goblin and Scorpion forever, we finally get a rounded-out collection of classic interpretations of Rhino, Electro, and even our fist glimpse of Hydro Man. If you guessed that his power involves water, you’d be right. Water can be very dangerous, one must assert. We’ll also be seeing Ka-Zar for the first time, in all of his shirtless, savage glory, and… Stilt-Man. Who has the power of really long robot legs. Of course, this unfortunate villain only paved the way for such others as Unicycle Lass and Thirty-Clowns-in-a-Tiny-Car Man, none of whom were effectual by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, each character’s unique abilities are usually useful in making up a powerful team to battle with.

If all of this seems obtuse and inaccessible, there’s hope. On the same day, WizKids will be releasing their ‘Danger Room’ starter set, which is an excellent and convenient jumping-on point for anyone who is interested in playing the game, complete with an updated rulebook and everything that you need to play, including six exclusive X-Men figures that you can’t get anywhere else. It might take a few bucks to put together that perfect Fantastic Four team that you’d love to send into battle, since the original versions of these figures (and many other early figures) have been discontinued, but it’s not impossible. And if you really get into playing, Wizkids has national tournaments and very serious venue rules (and free prizes offered) so that you can play competitively at your local comic shop.

For a clearer overview of that excitement that the game has generated, pop on over to HCRealms.com, the internet’s leading community for discussing and trading HeroClix. Also, check out the WizKids official site for some more insight into the gaming process. They can make thirty Spider-Men with different costumes and slightly different powers and I’ll still be excited.

While there have been many cabinetmakers of note, Duncan Phyfe is without doubt one of the most well-known names in American furniture history. He was so influential, in fact, that in 1922 the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition of his work, the first focused on the designs of a sole American cabinetmaker.

Duncan Phyfe was born in Scotland in 1768. His family emigrated to the United States in 1784, settling in New York. Phyfe’s father was a cabinetmaker, a woodworker specializing in furniture, and opened a cabinetmaking shop in Albany. After completing his apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker, Duncan Phyfe moved to New York City in 1791. There he opened a joiner’s shop that did well, and within a few years he expanded to a larger facility.

Phyfe attracted a wealthy clientele that appreciated his elegant designs and superior craftsmanship and before long his furniture was the rage, not only in New York but all over the United States. Duncan Phyfe’s influences included Hepplewhite, Sheraton, Empire and French Directoire. Phyfe preferred to use mahogany in his designs, though he eventually turned to rosewood, and he hired top upholsterers, carvers and other craftsmen to create the furniture. His work had a major impact on American furniture styles of the 1800s. He continued to expand, purchasing houses that surrounded his shop until his manufacturing facility employed over 100 workers and included a warehouse.

In 1837 Phyfe brought his two sons into the business, changing the name to Duncan Phyfe and Sons. Upon the death of one of his sons, he again changed the name of the company to Duncan Phyfe and Son. In 1847 he retired from his business and died in 1854.

Duncan Phyfe furniture was rarely marked as such, making it difficult to determine whether or not a particular piece of furniture actually hailed from the Phyfe workshop. Also, many dealers use “Duncan Phyfe” as a generic phrase to refer to any furniture made in the Phyfe style.

Click here to read more about identifying Duncan Phyfe furniture.

The technology of today is quite simple, by comparison: it works well, it does what it needs to do with the minimum of instruction, and when it stops doing so, it’s thrown out and replaced. When we think back to the “good ‘ol days,” much of the memories are of how we dealt with the stone-age technology we were stuck with. We remember that combination of steps to get the car started (choke out, turn it over, count to ten, push the choke in, hold the gas down). We knew to stop the VCR just before it’s done rewinding, lest horrible tape destruction occur. We marvel at those archaic computers that required you to stop what you were doing, put in a new disk or cartridge, and reboot to start a new program. Frankly, we wonder why we remember those days so fondly.

There are many among us, however, who not only love that technology, but devote their free time to making those intricate and fragile pieces of machinery work. On and off, I’ve been a collector of all things computer. In my basement is a TRS-80 III, my first computer, still in relatively working order. The “E” key requires extra pressure to get it to work (a habit I continued even in later computers), and floppy disks had to be aligned just right to work. I’ve been a temporary collector, holding on to computers only long enough to prepare them for resale, but those days spent squeezing any usability out of those computers are delightfully fun. Recently, a Apple ][e ended up in my hands — complete with an original copy of Oregon Trail. I played for hours, trying to beat the game, since I never did during my gradeschool years (I still failed). Thousands of these computers were made, ditto on the software, so neither were particularly rare, but that combination of computer and software has a particular value to everyone who attended gradeschool in the 1980s. Despite newer versions of Oregon Trail being available, the early versions have a nostalgic value that you can’t get any other way. There are Atari 2600s, with their horrible sound and mediocre graphics, being played, right now, while XBoxes sit idle nearby. Sure, they might have to blow on the contacts and insert the cartridge just right to get the 2600 to play, but it is not discouraging enough to toss out the machine. The attraction isn’t the highest quality, the greatest usability. The pleasure is in getting just as much out of these machines now as twenty-five years ago.

Vintage Harleys and classic cars might have their quirks and troubles, but they’re still street legal, and for the most part you can find a mechanic. Finding a repair shop to fix your Intellivision is a bit tougher — the technology is obsolete, and unusable to anyone but collectors. Collectors of obsolete technology know what they’re in for by taking on their hobby. They want their technology to remain usable and functional, despite any availability of spare parts. Phonograph collectors hoard needles and belts to keep their collections running. Typewriter collectors ration their ribbons as best they can. 8mm movie connoisseurs watch eBay for lamps and film.

The king of obsolete technology, however, is the steam thresher afficianado. These machines amount to a railroad engine that has left its tracks; they are steam-powered behemoths that chug across open ground, pulling farm machinery behind. Modern gasoline and diesel technology rendered steam power obsolete before even my grandfather’s time (and a new generation of collectors are restoring early gasoline tractors, too), leaving most of these rusting in shelter belts or sold for wartime scrap. One of the few places you can still see these machines is the Western Minnesota Steam Thresher’s Reunion in Rollag, MN. Once a year, these skilled collectors (who must be licensed to operate the steam boilers that power their machines) gather, fill their tanks with water and stoke the burners, and putt-putt around Minnesota’s lake country. Running these machines is hot, can be frustrating if a machine is being tempermental, and could even be dangerous if something goes wrong. The collectors, however, smile brightly, in their blue-and-white striped overalls, red bandanna tied around their neck, face coated with a haze of soot.

For whatever reason — nostalgia, proof of expertise, or simply to see if they can do it — collectors love to show off the things that shouldn’t work, and prove that, yes, they still do. Their collections need not be complete, or even rare. These collectors are not accumulating things, objects to be passively observed. These collections exist because they do something, even if there’s a simpler or better way to accomplish the same tasks. They live for the moment when they press ‘go’ on their collection…and it does.