An Automaton ala Lothar Meggendorfer

by Stephen J. Gertz

An exceedingly scarce Schoenhut automaton, c. 1890-1900, in full working, unrestored and fine condition - with its original key, yet - featuring illustrated figures in a comic situation typical of movable book master Lothar Meggendorfer has come onto the market.

The scene depicts a tailor sitting at his table with his legs crossed, drowsily stitching a garment while nodding off. To the left, a rascal apprentice also sits at the table with his legs crossed stitching a garment. All of a sudden he sneezes and pricks his dozing master with a sewing needle while his companion apprentice looks on and stops ironing in anticipation of the stab. The tailor jerks awake at the pinprick, but soon dozes off again and the cycle begins anew.

Schoenhut automata have become insanely difficult to find;  I'm aware of only one other coming into the marketplace within the last ten years. As might be easily imagined, automata for children did not endure their enthusiastic play any more than movable books easily survived the eager little hands that mauled them.

Albert Schoenhut (1848-1912) was born into a toy-making from Wurtenberg, Germany; his father and grandfather made dolls, rocking horses, and wagons. As a boy Albert was a toy-making prodigy. His toy pianos were more than just, well, toys. They stayed in tune.

In 1866, a buyer for Wanamaker’s, the famous Philadelphia department store, heard about the wunderkind of Wurtenberg and hired the seventeen year old as a repairman of glass sounding pieces in German toy pianos that had been damaged in shipping en route to Philly.

In 1872, Schoenhut left Wanamaker's to establish the Schoenhut Piano Company on Frankford Avenue in Philadelphia. As his toy piano business prospered, Shoenhut added other toy instruments to his line and expanded it to include dolls, circus figures, toys, and, as here, automata. By 1901, the firm had 125 employees making novelty toys.

By the time of Albert's death, Schoenhut Piano Company was the largest toy company in the United States and the first in the U. S. to export toys to Germany; up until then it was the other way around. 140 years after its founding it is still active as a maker of toy pianos, though, after multiple changes in ownership since Schoenhut's death in 1912, its archives have been scattered and all records of their vintage automata are, alas, lost.

As a result, it is unknown whether Schoenhut copied existing Lothar Meggendorfer designs or had an employee finely imitate the great Meggendorfer's style.

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[AUTOMATON]. [“The Tailor and His Two Apprentices”]. [Philadelphia: Schoenhut, n.d. c. 1890-1900]. Boxed automaton. Image size: 11 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches; 293 x 395 mm. Box size: 13 5/8 x 17 5/8 x 5 1/8 inches; 345 x 447 x 130 mm. Schoenhut blue trademark label to rear.

Three cardboard figures in original paper-covered wooden box, with glass cover and gold-painted metal frame. A sliding panel on the back of the box reveals cardboard parts moved by clockwork mechanisms, which can be wound up with the original metal key.

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Videography by Dustin Jack and courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Of Related Interest:

Lothar Meggendorfer Mania at Auction.

Lother Meggendorfer Animates the Inanimate.

A Movable Book Feast.

Waldo Hunt and Pop-Up Books: A Brief Overview.
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A Movable Book Feast: The World's Greatest Collection Comes to Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

The startling resemblance and typical tableau deeply disturbing, I must begin by categorically denying that the terrifying portrait above with its desperate plea for acceptance is of yours truly, reproduced from my high school yearbook.

It is, rather, one of the five color lithographed circus scenes from Only To Say How Do You Do - And Introduce Myself To You (London: Raphael Tuck, c. 1910), one of over 240 volumes from the Landwehr Collection, the world's most remarkable assemblage of movable books in private hands. The collection will be auctioned on November 21, 2011 by Ketterer Kunst in Hamburg. All the books are rare, and scarce in this condition: as good as it gets for toy books that soon turned into confetti in the hands of enthusiastic children.

From: (ABC Book). Das Originelle ABC.
[Nürnberg: G. N. Renner, c. 1835].
First edition. Abecedaire with illustrations in vibrant color.
With 71 hand-colored copperplates. Folio.

John Landwehr is the renowned Dutch collector and bibliographer of emblem books, the author of the standard reference on Dutch color-plate books, an esteemed scholar of the Dutch East India Company, and, not so by the way, one of the world's great collectors of children's literature, with an emphasis on movable books.

From: At the Circus. New York: New York Book Co. [c. 1910].
First edition, from the series 'The Moving Picture Books.'
With 4 color-lithogr. plates with movable elements and
4 illustrations in colors. Orig. half cloth with front board
illus. in colors. Large octavo. Not in the Osborne Collection.

The collection is unique in terms of extensiveness and quality. It documents the history of movable books as well as pop-up, surprise, and transformation books.

From: Aventures extraordinaires de Monsieur de Krac.
Paris: A. Capendu, [c. 1890].
First edition. W ith 5 color-lithogr. plates with movable
elements and 4 illustrations. Orig. half cloth with front
board illus. in colors. Small quarto..

All the books date from the mid-19th through early 20th centuries, and represent the best of English (Dean, E. Nister, and R. Tuck), American (McLoughlin), French (A. Capandu), and German publishers.

From: Playtime Surprises by Clifton Bingham.
London and New York: E. Nister and E. P. Dutton [c. 1900].
First edition, publisher's no. 610. With 6 color-lithogr.
rotating plates and 11 illustrations. Orig. half cloth with
front board illus. in colors. Small quarto.

At this point, I'm just going to get out of the way and let these movables move you.

From: (Cinema-Book).The Little Green Man of the Sea.
London: Brown Novelty Company, [c. 1926].
First edition. A magic narration with convertible illustrations.
With 19 (12 fullpage) illustrations and "Cinemascope" with
blue and red foil. Orig. half cloth with front board illu. in colors.
Small quarto. When not in use the cinemascope glasses can be put away
in the small mounted tuck-in flap on front endpaper.

History of the Three Little Kittens Who Lost Their Mittens.
London: Dean & Sons, [c. 1859].
First edition. With 8 colored lithogr. plates with movable elements.
Orig. half cloth with illus. in color on front board. Small quarto.
Not in the Osborne Collection.

From: Hurra! Hurra! Nun Sind Wir Da! Ein neues bewegliches
Bilderbuch mit hübschen Erzählungen. [Germany, c. 1920].
With 4 color-lithogr. plates with movable elements.
Orig. half cloth with front board illus. in colors. Small quarto.

From: Isn't it Funny.
London, Paris and New York: Raphael Tuck, [c. 1895].
First edition, publisher's no. 1502. With 4 color-lithogr. plates
with movable elements and 7 (4 in color) illustrations.
Orig. half cloth with illus. on front board in colors. Small quarto.
Not in the Osborne Collection.

Zauber- und Verwandlungs-Bilderbuch. [Germany, c.1880].
Transformation picture book. With 42 illustrations, some in colors.
Orig. cardboard illustrated in colors. Small octavo.

From: Howard, J. H., Naughty Girl's & Boy's Magic Transformations.
New York: McLoughlin Bros, [c. 1882].
First edition. With 4 mounted foldable color-lithogr. plates.
Orig. wrapper with front board illu. in colors. Octavo.
Not in the Osborne Collection.

 

Toulouse-Lautrec, H. The Motograph Moving Picture Book.
London: Bliss and Sands 1898.
First edition. With 23 color-lithogr. plates (incl. title) by F. J. Vernaj,
Yorick et al. Orig. half cloth with front board illu. in colors by
H. de Toulouse-Lautrec. Quarto.

 It wouldn't be a collection of movables without the mechanical books of Lothar Meggendorfer. There are an astounding eighty-six Meggendorfer volumes in this collection. Booktryst will devote a separate post to the Landwehr collection of Lothar Meggendorfer next week.

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Images courtesy of Ketterer Kunst, with our thanks.

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Visit The Movable Book Society.

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Of related interest:

Movable Books Pop-Up at the Smithsonian.

Say Hello to the First Talking Book.

Waldo Hunt and Pop-Up Books: A Brief Overview.
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A Pop-Up Book of "Exquisite, Sentimental Beauty"

by Stephen J. Gertz

The Land of Long Ago (1898).

It's rare when  a 113 year old pop-up book in pristine condition lands my desk. It's even rarer when a 113 year old pop-up book in pristine condition lands on my desk, jumps into my lap, and opens to reveal  eye-popping pop-up tableaus that dazzle with the quality of their color printing, and warm with their lovely vintage charm.

Beauty and the Beast.

I am beholding what is regarded as among the most beautiful achievements of the genre, an Ernest Nister production.

 

Mister Nister was a printer and publisher based in Nuremberg, Germany. He established a London office in 1888 under the direction of the writer Robert Ellice Mack and, specializing in children's literature, soon issued pop-up, movable, transformation, and panorama books, as well as standard children's fare, operating until c. 1917.

The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.

"Though primarily involved with his successful color-printing business, publisher and printer Ernest Nister (1842-1909) specialized in colored toy and movable picture books. Operating in both Nuremberg and London in the 1890s, this entrepreneur developed a distinctive style firmly lodged within nineteenth-century aesthetics.

"However, Nister's images outshine those of his contemporaries by epitomizing an exquisite, sentimental beauty. His artistic vision guides all the works regardless of pop-up mechanics and even of illustrator. In fact, we are uncertain to what extent Nister contributed his own illustrations to these books. In many cases, he imposed his own monogram on images in his imprint, dropping the artist's signature in the course of the production process."

Puss In Boots.

 

Detail: Note the finely granulated texture to the print, the hallmark of lithography.

"Nister used a wide range of movable techniques to intrigue children. The popular late nineteenth-century blind format of Changing Pictures, for example, capitalizes on a child's fascination with peek-a-boo. We are surprised to find Jack climbing the beanstalk behind Little Bo-Peep. Nister also animates his pages with simple slats, dimensional scenes, and remarkable pinwheel mechanics. With these basic paper tools, he creates fantastic transformations.

Sleeping Beauty.

"The 'long ago' of [The Land of Long Ago] speaks to a 'never never' land of fairy tales. The casting of such stories into a remote historical past cuts them loose from any connection to reality" (University of Virginia, Pop Goes the Page: Movable and Mechanical Books from the Brenda Forman Collection).

Little Red Riding Hood.

The pop-up plates were printed via chromolithography, a multi-color printing process originally developed in Germany in the nineteenth century that used heavy oil-based inks, devoted one stone for each color, and layered the colors to achieve a rich, textured effect that is easily confused with an actual oil painting, unless you look very closely and observe the finely granulated imprint of the stone's surface upon the paper.

 

Some objected to chromolithography because it could reproduce a painting so well as to be deceptive. But artists were pleased; the process was the finest for reproducing their original color images as accurately as possible.

Cinderella.

 

Little is known about the artist, E[velyn] Stuart Hardy (b. 1870). She was the sister of illustrator Paul Hardy, a writer and illustrator of children's books in color and black and white, military subjects in black and white, and various editions of English classics, including Jane Eyre.

 

The books of Ernest Nister were extremely popular in America, published, heavily promoted, and sold by E.P. Dutton. Edward Dutton kept a close eye on publishing trends in Europe and, recognizing their profit potential, contracted with Nister to exclusively distribute and sell his books in the United States.

High production values and comely imagery withstanding, what remains most impressive about this copy is that it was never, apparently,  enjoyed by the child it was originally designed for; an untouched copy sitting under someone's bed or in their closet for over a century. Movables of this vintage are generally found in various stages of destruction; the books were routinely played with by kids until they ended life as confetti  (the books, not the children).

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[POP-UP BOOK]. WEEDON, L.L. HARDY, E. Stuart (illustr.). The Land of Long Ago. A Visit to Fairyland with Humpty Dumpty. With Pen-and-Ink Illustrations by E. Stuart Hardy. London - New York: Ernest Nister - E.P. Dutton, n.d. [1898].

First edition. Oblong quarto. Six chromolithographed pop-up plates. Black and white text illustrations throughout.

Quarter red cloth over full color pictorial boards.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Waldo Hunt and Pop-Up Books: A Brief Overview.

Movable Books Pop-Up at the Smithsonian.
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Lothar Meggendorfer Animates The Inanimate

Deep within a secret atelier in Munich, Germany, circa 1880-1900, a mad artist with a mechanical turn of mind was bringing life to the inanimate. A photo survives of his first success:

"It's alive! It's alive!"

People, however, were none too pleased about his experiments so, in a desperate attempt to avoid a torch and pitchfork-bearing posse of villagers seeking vengeance and on the prowl for his blood, he changed his name, underwent extensive cosmetic surgery, turned away from humans and began working on books. Books that had life, and were animated. Books that moved. But were no threat to families and children. Children could, indeed, delight in them. The burghermeister could sleep easily, the Prefect of Police, relax.

"The book is the life, Mr. Renfield." 

(Whoops. Sorry, wrong story).

If you want life in your books, look no further than Dr. Frankenstein, er, Lothar Meggendorfer's movable books. Specifically,  one of his rarest, a book that, according to ABPC, has not come to auction within the last thirty-five years, with no copies, per OCLC  and KVK, in institutional holdings worldwide.

"It's alive! It's All Alive!"
(First U.K. edition, scarce).

What's the big megillah with Meggendorfer?

"Quite simply, Meggendorfer turned the mechanical toy book into a work of art. He was the supreme master of animation: every gesture, both animal and human, is conveyed with uncanny precision via the primitive but - in his hands - versatile medium of moveable paper parts. but the pictures do more than move; they come passionately to life…Meggendorfer captures the essential gesture in his moving pictures and that is his genius..." (Maurice Sendak, The Genius of Lothar Meggendorfer. p. 1).

Lothar Meggendorfer (post-surgery).

"While Meggendorfer was an inventor, working with paper, he was also an artist of great talent," says modern master, Waldo H. Hunt, "who insisted upon handling most of the details required of multicolored lithography...But what really set Meggendorfer apart, and what has continued to fascinate collectors of his work, are the ingenious mechanizations that he achieved, not just for their own sake but to fulfill and enhance the comic or dramatic effect that he had in mind" (Introduction to The Genius of Lothar Megendorfer).

“There is little doubt that the most elaborate and ingenious movables ever produced were those of the German Lothar Meggendorfer (1847-1925) made during the 1880s and 1890s…the mechanisms and operations of Meggendorfer’s books—not to mention the originality of his figures—are far superior to any others published before or since.…'They were marvels of ingenuity…Usually several movements took place at the same time on the same page' (Eric Quayle)…The devices that operated the various figures in Meggendorfer’s books consisted of a series of inter-connecting cardboard levers sandwiched between the coloured illustration on the front of the oblong leaf and the dummy pasted behind it. The animated limbs and heads were cut-out models on the front of the picture, and moving the tab set the whole scene in motion…Needless to say, such was the delicacy of Meggendorfer's machinery that if a child pulled too hard the whole thing could be ruined beyond repair” (Haining, Movable Books, pp. 65-73).

Pull tab at bottom and the cows bob the trough.

From All Alive.

Despite Meggendorfer's charming admonition that "Men and creatures here you find/Are lively and amusing;/You fingers must be slow and kind/And treat them well while using," the books were routinely subjected to rough treatment by the enchanted children who enthusiastically played with them.

Given the circumstances, it's something of a miracle that any have survived in collectible condition.

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MEGGENDORFER, Lothar. All Alive. A Movable Toybook by Lothar Meggendorfer. London: H. Grevel & Co., [n.d., ca. 1885-90].

First English edition of Lebener Tierbilder (1884). Large folio (12 15/16 x 9 5/16 inches; 329 x 235 mm.). [17], [1, blank] pp. Lithographed preface and eight full-page chromolithographed plates (included in pagination), each of which has a movable tab to set the scene in motion. Each plate with a leaf of text opposite.
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Meggendorfer resources:

The Originality and Artistry of Lothar Meggendorfer, University of Virginia.

Aleph-Bet Books, the respected childrens lit. specialists, has as complete a bibliography of Meggendorfer as can be found in English, based upon books they have now, or have had in the past.
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