Judaica From Tuck Collection in London to Be Auctioned The Tuck family, two generations of Prussian Jewish immigrants in Victorian London, ran a publishing house that catered to new Christmas traditions. Beginning in the 1870s the Tucks mass-produced holiday greeting cards with inventive Santa and angel cutouts and embossed mistletoe garlands. Gustave Tuck, one of the family scions, spent part of his profits on Judaica. University College London set up a museum for his silver ritual objects, and they narrowly survived 1940s air raids that destroyed campus buildings. The Tuck collection has for decades been in and out of storage at the university. During the last year the Jewish Historical Society of England and the Jewish Museum London sifted through the material and allotted pieces with Anglo-Jewish provenance to British collections. About 20 of the remaining objects have been consigned for a Dec. 6 auction at Kestenbaum & Company in Manhattan. A 1780s Polish spice box in the form of a filigreed clock tower (estimated at $100,000 to $150,000) is ringed with figures of knights and severed heads of turbaned Turks. A 1920s Torah pointer ($1,000 to $1,500), perhaps made in India, has a finial shaped like a crouched monkey. A menorah ($7,000 to $10,000) in the form of a high-backed sofa has candlewick slots tucked under the seat. On 18th-century filigreed Torah finials ($50,000 to $70,000 for a pair), stamps identifying the silversmiths have faded illegibly. Tuck acquired many of the works in London at a 1932 Christie's auction of the collection of Arthur Howitt, an Austrian-born hotelier who had fallen on hard times. Identifying pre-World War II ownership can be crucial for Judaica, since so many stolen pieces flooded the market after the Nazis looted synagogues. "Provenance has become just gold dust in Judaica," said Daniel E. Kestenbaum, the owner of the auction house. A few months ago the Gunn Memorial Library & Museum in Washington, Conn., ran want ads in the antiques trade press seeking loans of dollhouses. Offers of single heirlooms and whole collections poured in, and the resulting show, "It's a Small, Small World: Dollhouses and Miniatures," opens on Nov. 25 with 50 designs. Scholarly discoveries turned up. Allerton Cushman III, an antiques dealer in Manhattan, is lending a 1747 British dollhouse that resembles a Palladian brick villa. He paid about $4,000 for it at a 2010 auction in Georgia. It was mislabeled as an "antique Victorian plantation-style dollhouse," although "1747" is incised on the pediment. As he removed 1970s plywood paneling from the six-room antique, he found luxurious Prussian blue paint on the interior walls and sturdy metal balusters on the mahogany staircase. If the dollhouse had come up for auction with an accurate description, he said during a recent tour of his apartment, it would have brought about $30,000. The Gunn show also attracted folk-art miniature oddities, including a Manhattan tenement complete with a bathtub in the kitchen and works from innovative European and American factories. The German 19th-century toy maker Moritz Gottschalk applied lithographs of gingerbread onto dollhouse facades, and he engineered minuscule elevators operated by cranks and pulleys. Tynietoy, a Rhode Island workshop with about 50 employees, specialized in Colonial Revival. The Gunn owns a 1920s Tynietoy house packed with glossy brown Americana. The Gunn exhibition goes against the prevailing tide at historical societies and museums, which have largely relegated vintage dollhouses to storage in the past decade. "It's all out of favor," said Stephen Bartkus, the Gunn's curator. Half a dozen privately owned dollhouse museums have closed in the past few years, but scholarly fans and those active in business remain committed. Ann Meehan, a Pennsylvania dealer and collector, publishes a monthly newsletter, "All Things Great and Small," sometimes devoting an entire issue to one room in an important dollhouse. Susan Grimshaw, a dealer and collector in New Jersey, blogs at tynietown.com and is working on a book tentatively titled "Tynietoy: American Colonial Revival in Miniature." Liza Antrim, a retired art conservator in Somerset, England, started acquiring miniatures in the 1960s and published her collection last year in the book "Family Dolls" Houses of the 18th & 19th Centuries" (Cider House Books). Elizabeth Johnston Prime, a collector who died in 2006, donated 44 miniature buildings to the Kemerer Museum of Decorative Arts in Bethlehem, Pa., and they will go on view in renovated galleries there next year. Mr. Cushman, the lender of the 1747 villa at the Gunn, has met and befriended all the field's major players. He has squeezed dollhouses into almost every corner of his home. His décor style is distinctive: He supplies doll families with pet dogs, crystal chandeliers, portraits painted on ivory and bountiful platters of fake food. During the apartment tour he brought out a strip of newly washed geometric carpeting that needs to be reinstalled in the stairwell of one of his 1840s houses. The whitewashed wooden steps are now the only unadorned patch in a blaze of patterned wallpaper and tables set for feasts. "When you're a dolls" house collector," he said, "there are always little things you have to do." In late 2010 Sotheby's filled a floor at its New York showroom with metal toy train stations, Ferris wheels, carousels, bridges and post offices. They belonged to Jerry and Nina Greene, a collecting couple on the outskirts of Philadelphia who have combined their first names to call their holdings the Jerni Collection. A fraction of their 35,000 pieces were on view at Sotheby's. The toys, manufactured between the 1850s and 1940s, represent real and imaginary infrastructure and tourist attractions in Europe and America. Sotheby's asked an undisclosed eight-figure sum for the Jerni trove, and it did not sell. One percent of the material is now returning to Manhattan for a show that opens next Friday at the New-York Historical Society, "Holiday Express: Toys and Trains From the Jerni Collection." Louise Mirrer, the president of the society, had seen the Sotheby's excerpts and then visited the Greenes" storage spaces. "We would love for somebody to buy this collection for us," Ms. Mirrer said in a recent phone interview. When asked if perhaps jars for donations would be on hand alongside the Jerni display, she replied, "We would have to put out many jars, gargantuan jars." Videos of trains circulating through Jerni scenery will be on hand, but the historical society will not be activating anything on view. "If we owned them," Ms. Mirrer said, "we would make them move, but we don't yet."