“Children are so passionate,” said Gwen Owen of the Dayton Metro Library. “When you’re a kid, you love something with all your heart.”
With the “Storybook Dollhouse” on display at the main library, Owen, a community relations assistant, has found an unique way to capitalize on that passion while captivating library visitors of all ages. The picturesque wooden dollhouse is packed with 46 clues to classic and contemporary children’s literature, nursery rhymes and fairy tales. A tall yellow hat (Curious George), adorns a bedpost in the same bedroom where a “crack in the ceiling has a habit/of sometimes looking like a rabbit” (Madeline).
The idea was born years ago, when Owen became enthralled with a similar dollhouse at the Chicago Public Library. Last year, she bought a $5 raffle ticket for a dollhouse at The Miniature Society of Cincinnati’s annual sale. “If I win,” she promised herself, “I’ll build a Storybook Dollhouse.” Minutes later, her name was announced as the winner.
Owen checked out books on working with polymer clay and during the next 18 months lovingly crafted 33 of the dollhouse’s 46 clues. She culled from her own childhood pastime of creating elaborate “mouse houses” out of shoeboxes, complete with connecting doors and stairways and even miniature rolls of toilet paper and boxes of tissue paper.
Since she wasn’t an experienced crafstwoman, she recruited her mother, pencil artist Linda Owen of Dayton. “There was a lot of trial and error,” Owen admitted. “My first Peter Pan shadow just fell apart.” String worked far better than wire, she discovered, for the spider web in “Charlotte’s Web.” Other experiments went more smoothly: picking sandpaper for the sidewalk in “Where the Sidewalk Ends.”
Owen sought suggestions from her young neighbors near her new home in Kettering, Joel Baker, 12, and his sister, Gwynn, 7. The kids’ instincts proved true, judging from the delighted reception the Storybook Dollhouse has received since its debut at Urban Nights Sept. 16.
“What has surprised and pleased me the most are the teenagers,” Owen said. “They have been at least as interested as the young children. My theory is they’re old enough to be nostalgic about their childhoods, and young enough to still remember it well.”
Some clues are instantly recognizable, such as the ruby slippers attached to the witch buried underneath the house. Others have fallen by the wayside. “Nobody seems to know about ‘Casey at the Bat’ any more,” Owen said. “And the younger kids don’t seem to recognize ‘The Secret Garden.’ ”
What a pity. That’s one of the books I read and re-read in my childhood, hiding out under the lilac bush so Mom couldn’t interrupt me with trivial, unliterary chores.
When I read these books aloud with my own children, it’s like being reunited with an old friend.
Kevin Delecki, manager of the main library children’s department, said it’s hard to define what makes for a classic work of children’s literature, but it goes well beyond the quality of the writing: “The author has to create a character or situation that speaks to the child who is reading the book. Whether it’s Harry Potter or the Hardy Boys, when children are reading a favorite book, they become engrossed in that world. It’s more to them than a book that they’re reading; it’s very real to them.”
As adults, sadly, we lose much of that ability to become immersed in other worlds; we have forgotten how to “lose ourselves in a book” in the truest sense of that expression.
That’s the magic of the Storybook Dollhouse, with its cart packed with classic books positioned strategically nearby. Nearly all of those books have been checked out, Delecki said: “It’s really fun to watch the children’s eyes light up when they come around the corner and see the dollhouse. It’s so visually appealing it draws your eye, and kids love miniatures and love to search for things just as with Where’s Waldo? That thrill of discovery is so big for them.”
And maybe, just maybe, they’ll discover a new story — and a new friend — that will stay with them for a lifetime.
Share stories of your childhood favorites: Do you have a favorite book from childhood that has stayed with you all your life? Write about that book, and what it has meant to you, to mmccarty@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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