{"id":106293,"date":"2017-01-01T15:00:09","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T20:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106293"},"modified":"2016-12-30T13:11:02","modified_gmt":"2016-12-30T18:11:02","slug":"collectors-item-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/01\/collectors-item-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Collector\u2019s Item"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>We\u2019re away until January 3, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday!<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/princess.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-103826\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/princess.jpg\" width=\"601\" height=\"482\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>What was the Princess Diana Beanie Baby?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In the midnineties, my older sisters and I collected Ty Beanie Babies, as most of our peer group did. When I think of Beanie Babies, I think of the piles. Big piles saturated with every color and texture of fuzz, dotted with shiny black eyes and noses. They had a nice weight to them, too, a little heavier than stuffed animals. The pile became a classic image in the Beanie Baby mythos: the collector buried in Beanies. My sisters kept their collections (numbering several dozen) safely stowed in the pockets of over-the-door shoe organizers with plastic tag protectors and careful inventory lists, while I played with mine, ripping their tags off with abandon and allowing them, despite their Ty-brand prestige, to mingle with my other stuffed animals and dolls. Not that I had any objection to them as a commodity: I enjoyed collecting them, too, lining up at Pink\u2019s or Hallmark\u2014the two local authorized Beanie dealers in my New Jersey town\u2014in anticipation of new releases. I read the trade rag, <em>Mary Beth\u2019s Beanie World<\/em>. I called my local McDonald\u2019s answering machine to hear which Teeny Beanies they were offering with Happy Meals. I searched in vain for rare, highly sought-after defective Beanies: a Spot with no spot, an albino elephant.<\/p>\n<p>Today the Internet, with its relentless nostalgia mill, won\u2019t let us forget how worthless our Beanie Babies have become. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eonline.com\/news\/552622\/remember-when-everyone-was-going-to-re-sell-their-beanie-babies-and-become-millionaires\">Remember When Everyone Was Going to Re-sell Their Beanie Babies and Become Millionaires?<\/a>\u201d a piece on E! asked. I can\u2019t help but feel vindicated by articles like these. My sisters were convinced that their Ty collections would be worth a lot of money someday; they had to be protected. But: a toy you don\u2019t play with? It sounded dumb. It sounded dumb because it was dumb, and I somehow got that right\u2014this at a time when I was wrong about many, many things. This at a time when I thought that <em>Titanic<\/em> was the most culturally important, most pornographic, longest movie ever made. (I had not actually seen <em>Titanic<\/em>, but I knew from my own careful taping that you could fit six hours of video on a VHS tape, and <em>Titanic <\/em>took up two tapes, so it had to be, like, twelve hours long.)<\/p>\n<p>Still, I can\u2019t escape some weird feeling about Beanie Babies: about the bizarre hysteria they generated and the prescience with which they foresaw the Internet as a vast archive for our personal ephemera and its emotional baggage.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/24\/collectors-item\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read More &gt;&gt;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can\u2019t escape some weird feeling about Beanie Babies and the bizarre hysteria they generated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26379],"tags":[4064,25333,8892,25070,14036,19522,25335,25334,5658,1647,25338,25337,25339,160,10401,7007,2049,25331,25332,25336],"class_list":["post-106293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2016","tag-adolescence","tag-beanie-babies","tag-childhood","tag-clickbait","tag-collectors","tag-consumerism","tag-dodge-caravan","tag-mary-beths-beanie-world","tag-mcdonalds","tag-new-jersey","tag-princess","tag-princess-diana","tag-princess-diana-beanie-baby","tag-rainer-maria-rilke","tag-the-nineties","tag-titanic","tag-toys","tag-ty","tag-ty-beanie-babies","tag-zac-bissonnette"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - 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