An Unrecorded And Incredibly Rare Dean & Son Movable Book Is Discovered

by Stephen J. Gertz

  
Dissolving Views is volume of extreme scarcity, unrecorded anywhere, and with no auction records whatsoever. It is comprised of seventeen movable leaves with tabs which when pulled reveal another image. The first six are identical to those found in Dean's New Book of Dissolving Views (1862) but are here printed on off-white paper; in New Views... the paper is pale violet.

Of New Book of Dissolving Views, Percy Muir in English Children's Books noted, "Three volumes with this title were issued…The first volume appeared in June 1860 in an edition of 2,000 copies. The first picture in it is of a windmill, which 'dissolves' into a three-master at sea. The second volume…appears to have contained scenes from the Harlequinade. The third volume, with no indication that it was a sequel, appeared in November 1862, in an edition of 6,000 copies.. The first picture is that of a woman nursing a child, which changes to a piccaninny" (p. 234).

It appears that the seventeen movable leaves (I'm told that there were actually a total of eighteen) in Dissolving Views were divided into three volumes of six views each for the New Book of Dissolving Views series.

 

We can only conclude that the volume under notice precedes Dean's New Book of Dissolving Views series by a few years. Why this edition contains so many more views than subsequent issues remains a mystery but perhaps it was a case of too much of a good thing and, expensive to produce, the subsequent editions limited the views to six per volume.

It may also be that this was a transitional volume for Dean and Son from movables marketed to adults - it is bound in cloth with elaborate blindstamping and a gilt vignette as centerpiece, not in pictorial boards as one would expect for juvenalia and typical for Dean and Son - to movable books aimed at children who were, ultimately, the logical target audience.

And it is surely early: the cloth, blindstamping and vignette design are typical of the 1840s/early-mid1850s.

Whatever the truth, this is most certainly amongst the rarest of all Dean & Son movable books.

"The first true movable books published in any large quantity were those produced by Dean & Son, a publishing firm founded in London before 1800. By the 1860s the company claimed to be the 'originator of childrens' movable books in which characters can be made to move and act in accordance with the incidents described in each story.' From the mid-19th century Dean turned its attention to the production of movable books and between the 1860s and 1900 they produced about fifty titles" (Montanaro, A Concise History of Pop-Up and Movable Books).

"Dean and Son was the first publisher to produce movable books on a large scale. Thomas Dean, who founded the firm sometime before 1800, was one of the first publishers to take full advantage of the new printing process, lithography, which was invented in Germany in 1798. His business was devoted exclusively to making and selling novelty books, or 'toy' books, a term publishers began using in the early nineteenth century. His son George became a partner in 1847, and their toy books took over the market from the 1840s to the 1880s.

"Dean opened studios in London where teams of artists worked to design and craft all kinds of new and complex movables. Around 1856, Dean released a series of fairy tales and adventure stories under the title New Scenic Books. The scenes in the books were crafted in a "peep show" style. Each was illustrated on at least three cut-out sections. The sections were placed one behind another and attached by a ribbon running through them. This way, they could stay together and be folded flat as flaps, face down against a page. When a readers lifted a flap, a three-dimensional scene would actually pop-up!  A later, but good example of this technique is McLoughlin Brothers' The Lions' Den (ca. 1880), which is held together by a piece of board across the top instead a a ribbon.

"The books in new scenic series are probably the first that today's readers would consider pop-up books, although the term "pop-up" was yet to be used to describe such books. 'Movable' or 'toy book' was usually the choice for description. In 1860, Dean actually claimed to be the 'originator' of movable books.

"During the 1860s, Dean can be credited with inventing another first: the use of a mechanism that moved or was animated by pulling a tab. Dean advertised the new mechanisms as 'living pictures.' The Royal Punch & Judy is one of these early publications with tabs, which are located on the bottom of each page. In it, Punch and Judy are animated in their miniature theatre and act out all the violence and abuse that a Victorian audience would have expected from the couple" (University of North Texas, A Brief History of Early Movable Books). 

Miraculously, only one tab has been repaired to this copy; the others are all original and in fully functioning order suggesting that, indeed, this was a movable meant for adults otherwise it would have been a wreck secondary to book abuse of the child kind.

The Views:

1. Land. Sea.
2. War. Peace.
3. Day. Night.
4. Summer. Winter.
5. Fire. Water.
6. Earth. Air.
--
7. Fair. Dark.
8. War. Peace. (alternative images).
9. The Ocean Way. The Iron Way.
10. Outside. Inside.
11. Danger. Safety.
12. Saturday Night. Sunday Morning.
13. A Goose Hunt. Who's The Goose?
14. Fruit Search. Fruitless Result.
15. Sausage Meat. All Alive, O!
16. Pork Pie. Its Contents.
17. Curious Cabbage. Fighting Tailor. 

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[MOVABLE BOOK]. Dissolving Views. To look at these Views effectively, keep the Book flat on a Table, - pull the shaft from the bottom, for one View, and from the top for the other. London: Dean & Son, n.d. [c. 1856-59].

First edition (?). Tall octavo (10 3/8 x 7 in; 263 x 177 mm). Seventeen movable leaves as hand-colored woodcuts. Publisher's original deep purple cloth, elaborately blindstamped, with central gilt vignette of title spelled out as tree branches.

Cf. Osborne, p. 417.

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Say Hello to the First Talking Book

by Stephen J. Gertz

No one likes a book that talks back:

"Dog-ear my leaves and die!"

"How'd y'like it if I scribbled in your margins?"

"You said you couldn't put me down. Flat-leaver!"

Perhaps I should adjust my meds.

Be that as it may, all books speak to us on some level. It doesn't get more basic, however, than that found in The Speaking Picture Book, a movable book considered to be the first of its kind and magnificent.

"The piece de resistance of any collection of movables, or toy-books for that matter, is surely The Speaking Picture Book (c. 1893), an item of such charm and fascination that even the most blasé modern parents or their children can hardly fail to be captivated by it. Stored in an ordinary brown cardboard box, this 'Special Book with Picture, Rhyme and Sound for Little People' is a delight to handle, eye-catching in appearance, and quite remarkably authentic in the sounds it produces.

"The book, manufactured in Nuremberg by a firm unknown to most experts, is yet another example of German ingenuity. In addition to the main German edition, there were also translations of the text into English, French, and Spanish. In Britain, H. Grevel & Co, who had scooped the market with the Meggendorfer titles, handled this new masterpiece with similar success, while the famous New York toy shop, F.A.O. Schwartz, cornered the American trade.

Internal mechanism.

"…At the front of the book are eight full-page colour illustrations, each faced by a page of text in verse. At the side of each of these is a small arrow pointing at one of the nine little ivory tassels which are attached by strings through the side of the book to the mechanism concealed inside.

Mama and Papa.

 "The titles of the pictures are self-explanatory: a cock, donkey, lamb, some birds, a cow, cuckoo, goat, and Mama and Papa. As the respective tassels are pulled out, and then allowed to slide back, they operate different miniature bellows inside which produce the sound of a cock crowing, the birds chirping, and so on, in a most life-like sound which issues from the gilded wooden top and bottom edges of the book. Perhaps the greatest triumph of all is the last 'speaking picture' when two tassels produce the sound of children crying for their Mama and Papa.

"Copies of these remarkable books which have survived youthful hands, damp and dust, not to mention the ravages of time, are now justifiably worth hundreds of pounds on the rare occasions when they come up for sale" (Haining, Movable Books An Illustrated History, pp. 136-137).

The first edition in English was published (and manufactured?) by Theodore Brand, this moveable's inventor, of whom little is known. Based in Sonneberg (Thüringen), Germany, on October 15, 1879 he filed an application with the British Patent Office to patent "a speaking picture-book"' that was originally patented in Germany December 3, 1878 (Commissioners of Patents' Journal, January 27, 1880, p. 286, item #223,108).

An amazingly fine and fully functional copy has just come to market. If movable books move you The Speaking Picture Book will speak your language (Urdu, Swahili, and Tagalog iffy).

Just don't talk back to it. It's sensitive and easily cries. Nobody likes a lachrymose book; damp stains are an ever present danger.  And beware: it'll tug at your heartstrings when you pull the cord for Mama and Papa, turning from Moo-Moo to Boo-Hoo on a dime. 'Just what everyone needs,  emotionally labile literature. It's a tear-jerker in a book that's a box. But what a box.

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[MOVABLE BOOK]. The Speaking Picture Book. A Special Book with Picture, Rhyme and Sound for Little People. New York: F.A.O. Schwartz, n.d.  [c.1893-95]. Sixteenth edition. Folio (298 x 225 mm). Book-form box, enclosing nine printed leaves. Eight chromolithographed plates. Original red cloth. Upper board elaborately color decorated. Gilt title to spine. Nine pull-cords to fore-edge. All edges gilt. In original storage box. Made in Germany.
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Title page and external images courtesy of Peter Harrington Rare Books, currently offering this title, with our thanks.

Image of interior mechanical works courtesy of FlickR, with thanks.

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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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