My sister and I used to collect these Hagen-Renaker figurines as kids. We'd play with these tiny china animals instead of dolls, constructing elaborate homes for them in the folds of our blankets or legos, having them vacation in a jungle-like cluster of houseplants, sending them flying on Erector-set gondolas suspended on butcher-string zip-lines, building stores where we'd get each other to buy tiny tins (little sliding pill boxes) with surprises in them. We had no idea our china animals were collectibles that some adults were interested in; we were not very careful with them, repeatedly breaking the tails and legs off and regluing them with Elmer's. I still have all of them, insufficently wrapped with Kleenex, in my parent's garage. My thing was to collect all of the Siamese cat figures, but I also had a really cool owl, a couple of seals, some puppies, some horses, rabbits, mice... probably about 30 in all. I remember we stopped playing with them around age 12 (puberty, doncha know), and then a few months later we decided to try playing with them again for old times' sake. But the magic was gone. We were too self-conscious and it just seemed boring and pointless. It's very hard, as an adult, to regain that feeling of being completely engrossed in your own creative world. But I'm going to keep trying.