Noel Barrett to auction antique toys from now-closed Merritt Museum May 12-13 The late Mary and Robert Merritt Sr. traveled the world, collecting antique toys along the way, when few had an interest. The toys from their now-closed, legendary museum will be auctioned May 12-13.
News-Antique.com - Nov 30,-0001 - NEW HOPE, Pa. – What does an auctioneer do when he finds himself with too much of a good thing? If you’re Noel Barrett, you use your years of expertise to size up the merchandise, decide what should be sold with what, and spread it out in a series of sales. Barrett used the sequential-auction method to great effect with the Ward Kimball collection, and it seemed the logical, and obvious, way in which to proceed when he won the right to auction the toys, dolls and other exceptional antiques from the now-closed Mary Merritt Doll Museum. But when Barrett and his associates Becky and Andy Ourant assessed the Douglassville, Pa., museum’s vast and celebrated inventory and settled on auction dates for this fall and next spring, they realized that, by virtue of the volume of goods involved, those sales were going to be excessively long affairs.
"Then Becky had an idea,” Noel said. “She suggested we split up the Merritt dolls and toys so that the Fall 2006 and Spring 2007 auctions would be strictly dolls, and dolls’ houses and related items while the toys would become one of the featured collections of our May 12-13 auction. It made perfect sense, since that way toy collectors would not have to attend 2 doll sales waiting for the toys.”
The Merritt Museum’s collection includes a “very wide variety,” said Barrett, “some fantastic items. There are early German toys, trains and villages of carved and painted wood, Martin tin toys in very good working order, a number of them boxed.” Additionally, there are candy containers, animated figures, games and litho’d paper-on-wood toys, the latter of which were a perfect fit for another collection that came to Barrett’s for the spring sale, that of renowned collector Bert Cohen.
“About 100 lots were consigned by Bert Cohen, and his toys blended together really well with the Merritt toys,” said Andy Ourant. “Bert Cohen has a family connection to toys. He’s from the Leominster, Massachusetts area, and his father-in-law was the owner of the Irwin Toy Company. Bert worked at the Irwin factory in its heyday, back when they made the first Barbie car. He has a true passion for toys and has collected for a very long time. He’s known to many as a marble collector, but he also collected Reed litho’d paper-on-wood toys, which were made right there in Leominster. Some of the pieces in his collection are very rare, like the U.S. Capitol Building, which is one of his favorites.” Among the other litho’d paper-on-wood toys to be offered are a colorful “steam” loco and tender, circus animals in wheeled cages, a horse-drawn delivery wagon and a rare clown-on-mule wheeled platform toy.
The cataloging of the Merritt toys was a treasure hunt in and of itself. “We were genuinely excited to go to work each day, because we never knew what we’d find,” said Becky Ourant. Out of the showcases came European tinplate carriages pulled by cast-metal horses, and from the
