Nowadays we take multiple births for granted, but when a poor, 25-year-old French-Canadian farmer's wife named Elzire Dionne - already the mother of five other children - gave birth to a set of quintuplets on May 28, 1934, it caused an international sensation, though most people today under the age of 50 have probably never heard of them. They were, after all, the world's first known surviving quints, certainly the only identical ones, making them truly unique.

The girls - Marie, Emilie, Cecile, Annette and Yvonne - became little media darlings, the subject of much collectible memorabilia, from dolls to books to handkerchiefs to ads for soap.

Born two months premature and weighing a total of less than 14 pounds, the five babies were wrapped in wool scraps and placed in a basket near the kitchen stove to keep warm, but were not expected to survive. However, under the care of Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe and a team of nurses, they not only survived but thrived.

Ostensibly to protect them from exploitation, the Ontario government removed them from their family and placed them in a facility - the Dafoe Hospital and Nursery - built exclusively to house them. This had the opposite of the desired effect, as the compound soon became a tourist destination, with "Quintland" drawing more than 3 million visitors - who observed them through a one-way screen - in the nine years that they lived there apart from their parents and siblings.

The province of Ontario and local businesses earned roughly half a billion dollars from the Dionne Quint industry. After a bitter battle with the government, Oliva and Elzine Dionne eventually regained custody of their little girls, but as they were virtual strangers, the situation became strained, and the girls left home at 18, cutting off almost all contact with their family, living on a small trust fund until 1998 when the three surviving sisters were awarded $4 million in compensation from the Ontario government.

For the collector, there is no question as to what the No. 1 Dionne Quintuplets item is: the sets of dolls made by the Madame Alexander Doll Co. The top of the line were the 20-inch composition dolls dressed in silk party dresses and bonnets, each quint identified by name, which are much rarer than the 8-inch variety. Also in great demand are the 1935 8-inch layette set, with the girls as babies, valued upward of $3,600 in mint condition, and another in that same size with each quint in a different colored organdy dress and hat: Annette in yellow, Yvonne in pink, Cecile in green, Emilie in lavender and Marie in blue.

Most of the dolls (there was also a 24-inch baby with a cloth body) were all-composition, with swivel heads, jointed hips and shoulders, either wigs or molded hair; the smaller dolls have painted eyes, the larger have sleep eyes. Some of the doll sets included a Dr. Dafoe or nurse Louise De Kirilene doll, or special furniture like swings or a Ferris wheel.

These dolls were a key element in the history of the Madame Alexander Doll Co. A first-generation American, New Yorker Beatrice Alexander had a stepfather who operated a doll hospital and also sold high-end dolls, most of them hand made in Germany. When there was an embargo on German goods during World War I, Beatrice and her sisters began making dolls themselves to save the family business.

After the war, she continued manufacturing dolls, soon setting up her own company. When the Dionne quintuplets were born in 1934, "Madame" Alexnder moved quickly to set up a licensing agreement, and the public's continuing fascination with the girls in the dark years of the Depression went a long way toward securing Alexander's position in the doll world.

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