The Teddy Bear Collection

The teddy bear is a stuffed toy bear for small children. It is an enduring, traditional form of stuffed animal, often serving the purpose of comforting upset children. In recent times, some teddy bears have become expensive collector's items. more...

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Teddy bear collectors are known as arctophiles from the Greek words 'arcto' (bear) and 'philos' (lover). The world's first Teddy Bear Museum was set up in Petersfield, Hampshire, England, in 1984. In 1990 a similar foundation was set up in Naples, Florida, USA.

Naming

Theodore Roosevelt, whose nickname was "Teddy", enjoyed big game-hunting. According to one legend, the teddy bear received its birth at Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. To cheer Theodore Roosevelt after an unsuccessful day of hunting, Hotel Colorado maids presented him with a stuffed bear pieced together with scraps of fine material. Later, when he did bag a bear, his daughter Alice admired it saying, "I will call it Teddy." The term caught on.

According to another legend (and the one most often cited), the name derives from a bear-hunting trip in Sharkey County, Mississippi in 1902, when Roosevelt's tracker, noted African-American hunter and sportsman Holt Collier, found and caught an old injured bear. Roosevelt refused to kill the lassoed animal, calling it "unsportsmanlike", and instead released it. "Teddy's Bear" was immediately publicized by political cartoonists, taking journalistic licence and changing it to a young cute bear. The first such cartoon appeared the following day, November 16: Clifford Berryman, an editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, immortalized the incident as part of a front-page cartoon montage. Berryman pictured Roosevelt with his gun beside him with the butt resting on the ground and his back to the bear, gesturing his refusal to take the trophy shot. Written across the lower part of the cartoon were the words "Drawing the Line in Mississippi," which coupled the hunting incident to a political dispute (see picture to the left).

Producers

Morris Michtom and his wife Rose displayed two stuffed bears in the window of their Brooklyn store shortly thereafter (February 15, 1903), and said they had received President Roosevelt's written permission to call them "Teddy's bears".

German toy maker Margarete Steiff had started to produce stuffed toy animals in 1880; the first one was a little elephant. Her nephew Richard Steiff convinced her to produce a toy bear cub in 1902. It was not very popular in the German Empire, but at the March 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair they were able to sell a shipment of 3,000 to an American merchant. Michtom's bear had a more endearing, baby-faced appearance, while Steiff's more closely resembled a real bear cub. The Steiff company continues to produce teddy bears in modern Germany for worldwide export.

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