Movable Books to Novelty Prints

A Concise History of Beholding “Moving” Images

Visual and material culture, education, and propaganda comprise key and intertwining factors in the long history of materials that morph and transform through physical engagement. The history begins before the 12th century with movable parts in manuscript works that served as tools of memory and learning. By the 15th century and the printing of books, these instruments evolved into ones also devised for technical and entertainment purposes. Over the next 400 years, the genre grew to embody anti-clerical prints of churchmen that folded into devils, mechanical cards that satirized political leaders and royalty, and turn-up movable books providing a moral tale.

By the later 18th century, flap books with didactic, religious, allegorical, and entertainment agendas for their readers, such as American Quaker educator’s Benjamin Sands’s Metamorphosis, or A Transformation of Pictures, found their way across the Atlantic and into the hands of children and adults alike.

By the turn of the 20th century, metamorphic works predominated as novelties in advertising in addition to ones created as political propaganda that engaged and sought to persuade audiences of all ages through interplays of texts and images. The Staples Collection contains most of these genres of movables.

White hands turn up and down the flaps of a four-panel hand-drawn lift the flap book with eight flaps showing men, a woman, house, and tree in different changing scenes.

[The Love of Columbine for Harlequin], ca. 1760s. Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper with watermark JWhatman. Flap book. Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection.

A popular 18th-century comedic theatrical pantomime inspired this one-of-a-kind, likely British, hand-drawn early flap book. Constructed after the “turn up” books first issued in 1765 by English bookseller and printer Robert Sayer (1725-1794), multiple possible narratives of the chaotic love story of trickster servant Harlequin and Columbine, the jealously guarded daughter of merchant Pantaloon, could be devised by its reader. A “hiding-in-plain” sight correction on the pull down-flap of the third panel adds further allure to this handmade exemplar of this paper entertainment sometimes also called a “harlequinade” after the central character.

White hand with small spatula turns up and down the eight flaps of four-panel lift the flap book showing people, mermaid, lion, tree, and griffin in different changing scenes.

Benjamin Sands, Metamorphosis; or, a Transformation of Pictures, with Poetical Explanations, for the Amusement of Young Persons (New York: Sold by Samuel Woods and Sons, 1816). Engraved by James Poupard and printed by J. Rakestraw, Philadelphia. Flap book. Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection.

First printed in Philadelphia about 1787 and issued regularly until the late 1800s, this popular movable children’s book was inspired by the circa 1650 English turn-up The Beginning, Progress, and End of Man. Betsey Woods, who inscribed this copy as her “Property 1818,” would have learned to read and explore her imagination with the literacy toy and intellectual puzzle. Reconceptualized by Virginia school teacher Benjamin Sands (1748/9- after 1823), his Metamorphosis may have been particularly targeted to girls in the half century from when children’s flap books first entered the market. Scholars have noted the religious book’s border details against a narrow-lined background recall the needlework samplers that often comprised the education of 18th and 19th-century young ladies.

White hands operate a pull tab device showing Martin Van Buren smiling then frowning while holding a goblet, then mug.

David Claypoole Johnston, A Beautiful Goblet of White House Champagne. An Ugly Mug of Log Cabin Cider (Boston, 1840). Hand-colored engraving. Pull tab. Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection.

Boston artist and caricaturist David Claypoole Johnston (1799-1865) fabricated and printed this “before” and “after” portrait of incumbent Democratic presidential candidate and eventual loser Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) at his own studio. Early distributors of movable novelties included book and print sellers, fancy good stores, and stationers. One such multi-faceted store owner was Philadelphian Sarah Hart. She promoted her sale of this “little piece of pleasantry” that also comprised the first mass picture political campaign in a July 1840 newspaper.

Color printed fan shaped cards with vignette portraits of girls. Color printed fan shaped cards with vignette portraits of girls.
Color printed card showing 19th-century girls drinking cocoa.
Color printed fold out card showing an unhappy ill 19th-century family become well and happy. Color printed fold out card showing an unhappy ill 19th-century family become well and happy. Color printed fold out card showing an unhappy ill 19th-century family become well and happy.

Compliments of Grosh’s Pharmacy, 43d & Silverton Ave., West Phila. (Philadelphia, ca. 1882). Chromolithograph. Gift of William H. Helfand.

Maillard’s Chocolate (New York: Donaldson Brothers, ca. 1880). Chromolithograph. Gift of Emily Phillips.

Home Made Happy by Tarrant’s Seltzer Aperient (New York: Donaldson Brothers, ca. 1880). Chromolithographs. Fold out. Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection.

During the late 1870s, mass-produced colorful trade cards, suggestive of modern graphic designs, became a staple of business advertising. Trade cards, used early on by popular medicine manufacturers, included cheaper stock images or more expensive custom designs that depicted the product. Movable, pop up, and mechanical works added another element of cachet.

“Quaint Devices in Trade. The Extensive Growth of Picture-Card Advertising. Bright Colors and Odd Shapes—Tradesmen Generally Afflicted with the Craze—Cards Wanted That People Will Not Throw Away”
Headline, New York Times, June 18, 1882

By 1882, a New York Times article reported clothing dealers and confectioners were among the trades soliciting printing shops who made “illuminated advertising novelties from $1 up to $30 per thousand” with “a steadily increasing demand for devices of the most expensive kind.” “Pretty devices” described included “a series of dainty little palm-leaf fans decorated with delicate floral emblems and occasionally a child’s face.”

Open book with pages containing pop up geometric shapes.

The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara (London: John Day, 1570). Translated by Henry Billingsley.

Movable pieces used in early printed texts to educate their readers included wheel charts (vovelles) and devices like these pull-up flaps in this 16th-century translation of Euclid’s Elements. Translated by British merchant Henry Billingsley (d. 1606) and printed in 1570, this first English copy of Elements is also one of the first pop up books. The success of the three-dimensional paper sculptures in demonstrating the mathematical concepts described relied on the graphic design expertise of London printer John Day (ca. 1522-1584). Day is most known for his publication of John Foxe’s lavishly illustrated Protestant history The Book of Martyrs (1563).

White hands operate a print with a flap and showing a golden pear. Flap opens to show bust portrait of 19th-century royal couple.

A Windsor Paiear, Daily seen at the Royal Table ([London], ca. 1835). Hand-colored lithograph. Fold out. Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection.

From the 1790s to the 1830s, British printmakers became prolific publishers of novelty mechanical works depicting a visual pun. Typically, less political, educational, and religious in nature, these hidden picture devices, often with a flap mechanism, served to primarily amuse their handler. Playing off the satiric potential of the visual and verbal metaphor of the “pear,” The Windsor Paiear opens to a portrayal of the British monarch King William IV (1765-1837) and Queen Consort Adelaide (1792-1849). A design first published in 1833 by T. Bird, variant forms of the novelty portraying different members of the royal family were issued for the next thirty years.

Book open to page showing illustration of a girl lying in bed in a lavishly decorated bedroom.

Jacob Abbott, The Little Learner. Learning to Think (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856).

Nineteenth-century reading primers taught their users reading and proper elocution through questions, answers, and interpretations of vignette illustrations. An individual learned to read small images, visually and narratively. The process required readers to mediate between messages prescribed and subjective messages received in their understanding and “feelings” about the pictures in their hand. This learned behavior fed the culture of the era of the generations who saw, read, and/or operated many of the small moving works on display.

Sheet of paper with 19th-century handwriting.

Letter from William Humphrys to James Barton Longacre, before 1833.

In this letter to future Chief Engraver of the Mint James Barton Longacre (1794-1869), Irish-born Philadelphia engraver William Humphrys (1794-1865) schools his personal and professional friend to “leave something to the viewer’s imagination.” Both apprenticed to Philadelphia banknote engraver George Murray in the early 1800s, the men went on to create miniature pictures on banknotes, certificates, and title pages during their careers. Not only did the type of media affect the viewer’s imagination but also the layout and practical purpose of the material seen, touched, and read.

Book open to first pages of text for chapter titled Novel.

Nathaniel C. Fowler, About Advertising and Printing: A Concise, Practical, and Original Manual on the Art of Local Advertising (Boston: L. Barta & Co., 1889).

In 1889, copywriter Nathaniel C. Fowler (1858-1918) wrote the first book about advertising focused on practical guidelines and principles. An advocate of short, pointed, and original advertising copy, he could not deny the import of novelty, including “chromos,” in the art of advertising. In the decades to follow, titles such as Walter Dill Scott’s The Psychology of Advertising (1913) would be added to a growing list of treatises about the business.

Nineteenth-century trade catalog open to two pages showing different optical instruments, including magnifiers, microscopes, and a telescope.

James W. Queen, Philosophy of the Eye and Vision (Philadelphia, 1877).

Small images in need of magnification during their creation and reception were part of everyday 19th-century life. The growth of the ophthalmology and optician trade, and wider availability of magnifying glasses and other optical devices — yesteryear’s zoomifiers — accompanied the pre-1920 mass production of the miniature and moving materials on exhibit that were meant to be held and “felt.”