Maggie Iacono has been named the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime
Achievement Award by DOLLS magazine. Iacono, with 31 years of dedication
to the craft, raises the bar of excellence for the doll industry year
after year, making her an ideal pick for this year's winner.

Neva Dolls CEO and chief designer Stacia McDonough is putting a selection of her handcrafted Russian dolls on display at the Hillsborough Library in Hillsborough, N.J. Nov. 30 through Dec. 29, 2011.

The New Jersey-based company is known for its porcelain dolls designed to capture Russian history and folklore, with authentic costumes created from Russian furs and fabrics. “Neva Dolls pays homage to all Russian women through the centuries, from the peasant bride in the rural village to the courtly czarinas. The history of Russia's costumes is utterly fascinating,” McDonough said.

The Alexander Doll Company and Theriault’s auction house will host a reception from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, at the Alexander Doll Company Heritage Museum in New York in advance of the highly anticipated auction of author and socialite Candy Spelling’s rare, vintage Madame Alexander doll collection that will take place on Sunday, Nov. 20, 2011, at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York.

Online voting for the 2011 Colliii Awards opens Friday, Sept. 16 and will run through Sept. 30. All registered Colliii.com users can participate in the voting and everyone who votes will automatically be entered into a drawing for prizes donated by the award sponsors. Prizes this year include collector dolls from Schildkröt, reborn doll kits from Real Effect, and digital subscriptions to Dolls magazine. Prize winners will be announced after the voting is completed.

Colliii Award winners will be announced Oct. 24 on the Colliii.com website.

Join DOLLS publisher Joe Jones and the staff of DOLLS magazine for the official announcement of the winners of the 2011 DOLLS Awards of Excellence online Oct. 4, 2011, starting at 9 p.m. Eastern Time (8 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Pacific). Go to www.dollsmagazine.com Oct. 4 and click the DOLLS Awards of Excellence link to join us.

Sign in at the premiere webcast for a chance to win fabulous door prizes and be among the first to find out which dolls were voted the best by DOLLS readers. We also have some extra video surprises in store!

Did the Confederate South use a child’s doll to smuggle drugs past the Northern blockade? The PBS series "History Detectives" will investigate a family legend about a drug-smuggling doll in its Aug. 30, 2011, episode.

A huge collection of antique and vintage toys, amassed over almost 25 years, will be sold by auction in the Cotswolds in England this fall.

Until June, thousands of individual teddy bears, dolls, puppets, train sets, model cars, and tin soldiers — some rare and valuable, many very common and familiar to visitors as toys from their own childhoods — were on public display at the Park House Toy and Collectors Museum in Stow-on-the-Wold. The museum was founded by George and Barbara Sutton in 1987, originally as an extension to their antiques business.

An extremely rare 1914 bisque portrait doll sold for $168,000 (inclusive of 12% buyer’s premium) at Frasher’s Doll Auctions July 9 auction in Kansas City, Mo. Sculpted by renowned French artist Albert Marque (1872-1939), the doll was originally commissioned for the Paris boutique Margaine-Lacroix. The buyer, who beat out four phone bidders and additional on-site bidders at the KCI-Expo Center was new to Frasher’s client roster.

This year’s Colliii Awards are just around the corner. Registration for entrants runs from July 1 through Aug. 31. There is one new award category for 2011: Best Silicon Doll, open to silicon replicas of children up to the age of 3. The other award categories are the same as those from 2010 and include one-of-a-kind dolls, reborn dolls, reborn kits, and more.