MOVABLE STATIONERY Volume 3 Number 5
September 1995
Children's pop-ups, movables and novelty books: A short history for collectors
Part I
Michael Dawson Bath, England When is a book not a book? When it's an audio cassette, perhaps? Or a CD-ROM data retrieval source? Or even at a simpler level when it's merely a toy? -
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Pop-up and movable books have always been a bit
difficult for publishers and librarians to classify. For instance, not many early children's novelty books found their way into the British Museum Library, presumably because such things were not then regarded as important enough to fall within the terms of the Copyright Act. More's the pity, since pristine copies of some of the titles that are now known only from a few remaining childbattered fragments would have been a marvelous resource for those studying a genre that is only now coming fully into its own.
Obviously it is the popular children's books that receive the most grueling treatment - favorite stories are poured over, passed around family and friends, annotated, thumbed and folded maybe down two or three generations - whereas religious tracts and works of an "improving" nature have tended to stay clean...and largely unread. But however vulnerable conventional books may be to over-enthusiastic young readers, patently those that contain moving or folding parts are bound to be even more at risk. It is for this reason that surviving pop-ups and movables dating from before the 1850s are now extremely rare, sometimes changing hands at prices well into the upper four figure bracket. -
No one is exactly certain when the first movable appeared. Certainly im the sixteenth century, several learned astronomical treatise were published on the continent containing overlaying revolves that could be manipulated so as to determine the movements of planets, of which the Astronomicum Caesareum of Petrus Apianus (Ingolstadt, 1540) is perhaps the best known. The same idea was used more frivolousty in the next century when various pastimes appeared in book
form purporting to read character or tell fortunes by Nathaniel Crouche's means of revolving pointers -
Delights for the ingenious (London, 1684) being an example. By the eighteenth century reproductive techniques had advanced to the extent that printing became for the first time a truly mass medium. There was a profusion of illustrated books and prints often sold on street corners for coppers. One type of children's toybook, first produced m Britain by Robert Sayer in Fleet Street about 1766, mcorporated a series of overlaps hinged to the pages that enabled the young owner to rearrange parts of each steel-engraved picture so as to bring about a "metamorphosis." The idea proved successful and many other publishers, both here and overseas, copied the turn-up gimmick to tell simple moral tales (John Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress was a popular subject) or episodes in the Harlequin and Columbine tale hence the most common name for the genre: Harlequinade. Although almost fifty separate titles appeared in this country alone, many of which were undoubtedly reprinted until the plates wore out, comparatively few have survived probably the best collection now to be found is in the University of California Library in Los Angeles. -
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The notion that children should have books simply to enjoy is comparatively recent: in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries they were predominantly for instruction or moral improvement, not fun. Hence the curious Toilet Books that were fashionable in the 1820s. Near-miniature in format, comprised of eight or nine short verses describing each of virtues, the illustrations printed opposite (often hand-colored) incorporated a liftflap behind which an appropriate bon mot or supplementary picture could be found. William Grimaldi (a miniature painter) and his son Stacey (a London
solicitor) published the first, called simple The Toilet in 1821; innumerable imitations and variations were to follow.
About three decades later the firm of Dean & Sons, Printers and Publishers, Ludgate Hill (producer of scholastic books, primers and scriptural items for Sunday schools) decided to expand their range by including a series that mcorporated hand-colored plates with simple, tab-operated animations, subsequently claiming to have been the "originators Children's Moveable Books" -