Toy buyer seeks antique playthings

What he doesn’t love are Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch dolls and anything by those commemorative plate makers.

A rule of thumb for Zalkin is that a plaything that declares itself to be rare or valuable is unlikely to be either.

“If it says ‘limited edition’ or ‘collectible’ on it, it’s not,” he says. “The stuff we look for is the stuff kids actually played with.”

Therefore, if your Robby the Robot isn’t pristine, if you lost the box long ago, never fear. Zalkin and his colleagues with the Atlanta Antique Toy and Doll Buying Show, which runs Jan. 23-28 at the Courtyard Atlanta Perimeter Center, are still interested.

“The majority of the items we get are not in the boxes,” he says. On the other hand, “if they ARE in the boxes, they tend to be worth quite a bit more money.”

The 49-year-old antiquer was raised in upstate New York, and spent many happy weekends trailing behind his grandmother as she went from auction to antique store. He describes the event he will stage at the Courtyard Atlanta Perimeter Center as “Antiques Roadshow” meets “American Pickers.”

His clients will line up outside the hotel ballroom, like those who appear on “Antiques Roadshow.” And he offers them not just an appraisal, but a check, like the hosts of “American Pickers.”

Because of the success of those television shows, toy collectors are more sophisticated these days. But the Sarasota-based Zalkin says he still runs into customers who are surprised by the value of their old amusements. At his Atlanta buying fair last year, a woman brought in a No. 1 Barbie from 1959. After misreading the slip of paper on which Zalkin registered his offer, she was astonished to learn that his quote was not $13 but $1,300.

(In pristine condition, it would have been worth a lot more.)

His favorite items are antique dolls, with bisque or porcelain faces, from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. “Believe it or not, we get a ton of dolls from 1900 to 1920,” he says. In general, those dolls were owned by people who lived through the Depression who took great care of their things.

Now their grandchildren are unloading them. “The younger generation, 30 years and younger, they think those antique dolls are kind of creepy. They’ll say, ‘These scare my kids.’”

Zalkin has a ready market for those dolls with the staring eyes and rouged cheeks. They are snapped up by customers in Germany, Austria and Russia, where the dolls were manufactured in the first place.

“Those dolls didn’t survive over there,” he says. “They went through two world wars. When you’re saving your kids’ lives, you don’t grab your kids’ dolls.”