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A review by fuzzyhead
The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette
4.0
The events described in this book are stranger than fiction. A soap opera star spending his kids' college money on thousands of Beanie Babies? Families using disguises to circumnavigate per-customer limits during the Teenie Beanie promotion? An eccentric New Jersey couple becoming millionaires by self-publishing a devastatingly inaccurate Beanie Baby Handbook?
Part of the reason I found this book so fascinating is I remember this craze so well. (I even had the infamous handbook.) I was five or six when I was introduced to beanies, and I loved the whole thing. They were cute! And for me, they were primarily toys. I brought them to school, threw them up in the air, and sometimes (gasp!) the tags fell off. And yet, there was a tiny part of me that thought, hey, maybe these will be worth something someday. Of course, I was just a dumb kid, and in retrospect, it's amazing just how many adults bought into this whole thing. As this book points out, many people, thinking they were making an investment, were brought to financial ruin over stuffed toys.
Unfortunately, Ty Warner declined to be interviewed. Through interviews with former acquaintances and business associates, Bissonnette presents Ty as a controlling perfectionist, difficult to work with and even more difficult to live with. Bissonnette also profiles the earliest collectors, some of whom, leading up to the peak of the craze, really were able to resell beanies at a remarkable profit. (Of course, most people chose to hoard the beanies, thinking by now they'd be worth thousands. A quick trip to the "Bean Bag Plush" section of ebay proves just how wrong they were.)
It's a quick, fun (and yet rather depressing) read. It's also a cautionary tale. "Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute" sums it all up pretty nicely.
Part of the reason I found this book so fascinating is I remember this craze so well. (I even had the infamous handbook.) I was five or six when I was introduced to beanies, and I loved the whole thing. They were cute! And for me, they were primarily toys. I brought them to school, threw them up in the air, and sometimes (gasp!) the tags fell off. And yet, there was a tiny part of me that thought, hey, maybe these will be worth something someday. Of course, I was just a dumb kid, and in retrospect, it's amazing just how many adults bought into this whole thing. As this book points out, many people, thinking they were making an investment, were brought to financial ruin over stuffed toys.
Unfortunately, Ty Warner declined to be interviewed. Through interviews with former acquaintances and business associates, Bissonnette presents Ty as a controlling perfectionist, difficult to work with and even more difficult to live with. Bissonnette also profiles the earliest collectors, some of whom, leading up to the peak of the craze, really were able to resell beanies at a remarkable profit. (Of course, most people chose to hoard the beanies, thinking by now they'd be worth thousands. A quick trip to the "Bean Bag Plush" section of ebay proves just how wrong they were.)
It's a quick, fun (and yet rather depressing) read. It's also a cautionary tale. "Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute" sums it all up pretty nicely.