Pam’s Pictorama Post: After a long hectic week I take refuge in toy talk today. When I rolled out bed this morning and walked to a shelf of toys and took this fellow out Kim looked at me inquiringly and said, “Somehow you’ve never written about that particular Felix?” I have not. He arrived at a very busy time around my birthday and just the other day I thought about him, went looking for him and realized that I had unpacked him and tucked him on a shelf without serious consideration.

It probably won’t surprise Pictorama readers to discover that I have many rather compulsive collecting habits, formed and honed over years of searching for certain toys. I receive myriad notifications about auctions and notices about toy cats for sale on various sites such as Ruby Lane which is the origin of this guy. I’m sure there are people who have more refined processes and mine requires mulling through a lot of really dreadful items before occasionally there is something worth investigating. Maybe it is the only way to do it, maybe not.

As I said, this fellow turned up on Ruby Lane whose daily listings are among the worst really, at least based on whatever search I saved there. Infuriatingly, on the rare occasion something great turns up it is generally already sold and don’t even ask me what that’s all about and why they need to tell me. Still, I give it a cursory morning glance each day. It’s like the lottery – you have to be in it to win it.

One morning in early February (while still in bed) I saw this and did a double take. He is 12 inches long (ears included) and made of a fluffy mohair which is unusual, however I have at least one other, very small and very old Felix made of a similar wool. He is, as you can see, oddly pristine making me wonder if he was somehow newly made. Yet a close look at his face pulls me in the direction of older.

This has happened to me once before, back in 2018, and I wrote about it in a post here and the toy is shown below. He is also rather pristine, but of an entirely different type. Although I thought there was also a chance he was somehow newer, he seems even less so than this fellow featured today.

He was very (relatively anyway) inexpensive so, after I had a cup of coffee and could reason a bit, I figured it was worth taking a chance. If I ended up with a weird modern reproduction of an old Felix so be it. I purchased him and he arrived on my birthday, with some other nice items since it was my birthday, and I unpacked him and placed him on the shelf until my examination today.

His head rotates, but his arms are not movable. Most notably his tail is just knitted wool whereas most Felix’s have a stiff tail for better tri-pod style standing. This Felix sports this brand new looking red bow, has shoe button type eyes and nose along with his stitched on Felix grin.

All Felix toys have an expression which helps define them and this one has a benignly slightly cross-eyed one, maybe not too bright but affable. He has long pointy ears, not unheard of in Felix design, but a tad less common. His most notable feature though is the fluffy mohair he is made of which hovers off him like a halo. As mentioned above and shown below, I have another very unusual one (featured in a 2014 post here) with fluffy mohair, but a very different design.

My final analysis is that he is old, but of somewhat mysterious origin. Much like the off-model ones hand assembled on the East End of London (one of my favorite posts about that can be found here) there is a story here about the who and the how this was made which I have yet to figure out. Please send any information you may have. Meanwhile, Pictorama is on the case and will of course share any discoveries ultimately made.