Hitty was full of adventure and spirit, and she was a charmer who stole every reader’s heart and imagination. Children and adults were enchanted by the book, written as a memoir of Hitty’s doll life, beginning with her conception under the knife of an itinerant peddler who spent his winter carving a piece of mountain ash (a wood considered to have magical and protective properties that translate to some good luck for its possessor) right up to her appearance in the window of an antique shop a hundred years later. Extremely popular, the book won the coveted Newberry Award for 1930. What we did know was that in 1929, a writer, Rachel Field, and her friend, an illustrator named Dorothy Lathrop, published a book for children called Hitty: Her First Hundred Years. What may not be so obvious is that, at the time I first learned about Hitty, people were not absolutely certain that a real doll named Hitty existed or ever had. I first learned about Hitty as a result of my interest in miniatures and dolls (I am a past president of a United Federation of Doll Club (UFDC) in PA. The REAL Hitty as photgraphed in the Stockbridge, MA Library Museum by Julie Old Crow
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