ABOUT JOE BLITMAN

JOE BLITMAN has had very limited experience in collecting autographs.  He remembers being a very young boy in Las Vegas and tagging after his big sister on her frequent forays to snag movie star signatures (good gets: Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Debbie Reynolds; near misses — Marlon Brando and Grace Kelly.)

His father gave him a baseball signed by the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers (lost after too many moves.)  And he once stood in line for Lana Turner’s signature on her autobiography (after an hour of waiting for her to arrive, the large crowd menacingly started chanting:  “La-na!  La-na!  La-na!”)

In his real life, Joe is known internationally as a Barbie doll expert, author and dealer. He’s written over 100 magazine articles on fashion dolls and has authored three standard reference books on the Barbie doll family. He produced, wrote and starred in a best-selling hour-long video, Joe Blitman’s Oh You Beautiful Doll: featuring Barbie.

Joe is the co-owner of Joe’s, a thriving internet and mail order business (www.joeslist.com) that sells new and vintage fashion dolls. He co-starred with Leeza Gibbons in Mattel’s “Barbie as Scarlett O’Hara” infomercial, and has been featured as a Barbie expert on CBS Morning News, CNN, 20/20, NPR, Biography, Leeza, Personal F/X, Treasures in Your Home, the Roseanne talk show, Living Live, E, MTV and countless U.S., European, Australian and Japanese documentaries and newscasts about Barbie.

Born in New Jersey and educated at Oberlin College in Ohio, Joe also attended the University of Southern California Law Center. He currently lives in Hollywood, California, in a pale pink Mediterranean-style home friends have named “Barbie’s Dream Villa.”