Summer Reading 2015 (4): The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Zac Bissonnette, 2015)

Summer Reading 2015, #4: ‘A Nonfiction Book’

Thank you, public library new book shelves, for letting something cut in line.  Merlin a little later on, as I’ve allowed The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette to slip in ahead of it.  Two-week checkout limits on new books will do that.

So, to start with, I suppose I should begin with what led me to pick this book up at all.  It’s somewhat eye-catching on the shelf, with the title on the spine matching the coloration of the title on the front.  And let’s face it, a book in 2015 about Beanie Babies is going very, very much against the grain, and seems rather outside of its era.  I mean, Beanie Babies haven’t been relevant since their value tanked fifteen years ago.  But that was enough to get me to pick it up and take a look... and then the jacket flaps went and mentioned the Tulip mania and yup, I’m going to pick it up and take a look, because that makes perfect sense.

For those who weren’t conscious of what was going on at the time, Beanie Babies were... possibly the most bizarre example of a collector’s frenzy over anything in my lifetime.  Let’s face it, when the popular wisdom around a line of exceedingly play-friendly plush toys becomes ‘don’t let children touch them at all’, something has gone horribly wrong.  But that, in and of itself, wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting book.  And this is where Zac Bissonnette hit on a rather more interesting way to handle his book: more than anything, this is a biography of the business life of Ty Warner, from his beginnings as a salesman for Dakin, through the start of his own company (initially specializing in plush cats), all the way up to (and past) his 2014 conviction for tax evasion.

The link to Dakin surprised me somewhat; as a child, I had a downright ridiculous number of Dakin-made Garfield plushes (along with a few Applause-branded ones after the companies merged).  But they weren’t terribly play-friendly, as I recall; the traditional plush as created by Dakin was very, very full of stuffing, so they tended to stick to a specific pose.  That, as noted in this book, was the big trick to Ty Warner’s success: by understuffing the plush as a whole and filling a few strategic spots with PVC pellets to add weight, the Ty plush could be easily posed and played with, and he absolutely used that as a selling point.  Additionally, Warner has hand-designed almost every single plush that his company has ever marketed, and his attention to detail is definitely noticeable.

That said, the rise and fall of Beanie Babies as a valuable commodity was only partially related to the attention to detail.  That aspect of the bubble is explored as well, when the book reaches that point in the timeline, along with an examination of how the mania spread geographically.  The whole book is filled with original research the author did, interviewing as many people involved in the mania as he could; he even reached out to Ty Warner, who declined the offer, but Warner’s personality absolutely shows through, both the positive and negative aspects of it.

It’s absolutely a fascinating read, this.  And let’s face it, speculative manias on the scale of Dutch tulips, Dot-Com stocks, and Beanie Babies are one of those things that one should be aware of, if only to have an idea of how to avoid getting caught up in one.

Next up: Merlin stuff (again, for real this time)