Dean & Sons pre-eminence in publishing movable books was not seriously challenged until Rafael Tuck founded (in 1870) his London enterprise to produce luxury paper items like puzzles, valentines and paper dolls. Although better known for his firm's production of exquisite chromolithographed postcards (printed in Germany), the firm also published Father Tuck's Mechanical Series (1890), which featured several different mechanisms over the course of the series (e.g., transformationals, such as Pleasure Pages, depicted below), and a series of pop-ups like Fun at the Circus, also depicted below:
At about the same time (1877), Ernest Nister founded a publishing firm that would find a way to create pop-ups that stood up automatically (scenes would not have to be lifted up or pulled down manually). These were the firm's celebrated Panorama Picture Books, one of which--Wild Animal Stories--is depicted below. His firm also refined the transformational book with its dissolving picture books, which featured "a mechanism that would reveal pictures in a circular form, creating a kaleidoscope effect," as in Magic Windows, also depicted below:
Even more than for their mechanical innovations, though, Nister's movable books are renowned for their "exquisite sentimental beauty," a sentimentality that was quite popular with Victorian book buyers:
Nister published movable books for the continental European market from his firm's headquarters in Nuremburg, and for the English book market from his firm's headquarters in London and through a partnership with the American publisher E. P. Dutton.
The above innovations notwithstanding, it was the comic vision of the great Munich artist Lothar Meggendorfer that would have the greatest influence on the development of movable books. His movables feature some of the most complex mechanisms ever devised for such books, actuated by an innovative series of rivets and levers. (To see one of his firm's movable books in action, click here.) As Ann Montanaro has noted, [Meggendorfer] used tiny metal rivets, actually tight curls of thin copper wire, to attach the levers, so that a single pull-tab could activate all of them, often with several delayed actions as the tab was pulled further out. Some illustrations used more than a dozen rivets.
Meggendorfer created his first movable book, Living Pictures (1878), as a Christmas present for his son, Adolf. While his earliest movable books often were hand-painted (such as Immer Lustig, depicted below), later movables usually featured exquisite chromolithography (such as Comic Actors, also depicted below):
All of the movables from this first golden age of movable books are understandably quite rare, especially in anything like Fine condition. Decades of hard use by children have taken their toll, as Meggendorfer's movables often cautioned children that it would, as in these lines from Comic Actors:
The men and creatures here you find
Are lively and amusing,
Your fingers must be slow and kind
And treat them well while using.
All movable books, even today, require an enormous amount of hand labor, and the coming of World War I would remove most of that skilled labor from the marketplace....
Recent Comments