Family's Selling Complete Beanie Baby Set

Oh boy, another Beanie Baby tale. But this one is the Beanie Babiest.

Jack and Cindy Boggs of Richardson, Texas, have a rare complete collection of the stuffed toys, and it's for sale. They're all there, tags intact - 207 of them, and counting.

You'd think a collection this big would be hot, hot, hot. But try though they may for the past year, the Boggses haven't been able to unload their Beanie cache.

When the asking price is $125,000, the tough part is finding a buyer, says Andi Lucas, associate editor of Beans!, a Beanie 'zine based in Richmond, Va.

"It might be a celebrity or somebody who has a lot of money but not a lot of time," she says.

And when it comes to the average Beanie Baby collector, that doesn't leave many people.

The only potential buyers Lucas names are '80s pop singer Christopher Cross and actor Michael J. Fox, both of whom have been quoted as expressing interest in a complete collection.

Only a handful of collections match the Richardson couple's, says Lucas. "Really, I doubt that there's even that many out there - maybe a dozen - and we've never heard of them," she says.

The Boggses have been collecting only since September 1997, when one of their four children received a gift of Sparky, a Dalmatian.

By the end of the year, they had put together the entire collection. Most came from retail stores; they filled in the gaps by working the Internet.

Their most valuable Beanie is Peanut, a royal blue elephant, worth about $5,000.

"It's the cornerstone of a collection," says Boggs. "It got to be the one that people said, `Here's a limited one.' It became the one that the media and magazines took notice of. Everyone else had a Peanut in light blue. If you had royal blue, it became more valuable."

The Boggses have been unselfish with their Beanies.

For the holidays, they have lent it to the Dallas Museum of Natural History, which has put it in a temporary exhibit.

It's the family's goal to sell it to a charitable organization, which could then use it for fund-raising. To hear Boggs talk, it is almost enough to make you reach for your wallet.

"One of the joys of having the collection is when you watch people look at it," she says. "We're very much ordinary people. We would never have a painting or a piece of art to donate to a museum. Our families have never been in that world. And so, to have something that people go `Oooh' - like owning a Monet - you understand why we do it."

Lucas of Beans! is especially impressed with the collection's two "employee" bears, given only to Ty employees.

"There were only 300 made of each," she says. "This is what makes their collection so rare. When you think about it that way, it's very rare. There are only 300 possible collections like what they have."

But the world of collectibles is a cruel, unpredictable place. Some experts have deemed Beanie Babies a weak investment.

"The prices have dropped," Lucas acknowledges. "But I wouldn't say it's been anything drastic. For example, some teddies are still valued in the thousands of dollars. They're still worth money - but there's more collectors and they're not willing to pay as high a price."

To sell, the Boggs may have to swallow a bitter pill: dismantlement.

"Realistically, it's something they don't want to do, but they might have to break up the set if they want to get rid of it," Lucas says. "To interest the average collector, they might have to - and that would take away all the glory of it."