>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Silence ] >> Good afternoon everyone. I'm Mark Dimunation. I'm Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Welcome to another rare book forum. And thank you for being another massive crowd again. It's exciting isn't it? It's good to see this. I've said this before especially in terms of the wonderful experience we have with the Corcoran interns. That is the students from, Carrie, help me with the title. >> Art and book. >> Art and book program at the Corcoran College of Art. Those internships in particular are very near and dear to those of us who work in the division because they're intensive, there's a real passion behind the work of the Corcoran students. And in particular the thing that always gets us is they get to play with the books that we want to play with. And that's certainly the case today with Sarah Denslow's presentation. She got to play with the pop up books after all. And we're all very excited. I didn't, I wasn't the lead guy this time around. Jackie Colburn who's a rare book cataloger from the cataloging team, the rare cataloging team and one of the principals involved with our juvenilia collection here in RBSCD was the main contact. So I'm going to have her introduce Sarah. But I want to thank all of you for being loyal and coming by. And as you can see already it's going to be a very interesting talk. So I'm going introduce Jackie Colburn. [ audience applause ] >> Thank you all for being here today. I don't want you to think that Sarah and I have just been playing with books all semester, although we have done quite a bit of that and we've had a very good time. As part of Sarah's internship she got an awful lot of work done for the library as she was preparing for her talk and as she was learning about the collection. For one thing she's rehoused the dozens and dozens of our moveable books. So they are now in acid free enclosures and can go back to the stacks in safety. And she's added genre terms to the records that for the books that were catalogued which will be very helpful for researchers in the future. She's identified books that need cataloging. But possibly the part of the project that we both enjoyed the most is the discovers that we made in the stacks. We, because Sarah is a terrific book sleuth we were able to find moveable books that we didn't know we had. And we found books that we might have known we had but didn't know were moveable. And so there was often great rejoicing in the stacks, look what we found. And it's been very exciting and I've enjoyed working with Sarah very much. So I will stop talking to you and I will let Sarah talk to you. Thank you. [ audience applause ] >> Well I just want to say thank you to Mark and Jackie and everyone here at the library. Everyone, especially in the last few days has been so helpful in preparing this exhibition and speech. And it's been really wonderful and I think we've got some really very exciting books to show today. And I'm so excited to be giving this speech. Because for months now I've been telling everyone I saw the most amazing book at the Library of Congress today. And then I try to describe it and then of course, you know, describing a book when you can't look at it is hard enough but these are pop up and moveable books. And so now finally I get to show not only pictures but we have these wonderful books on display. So hopefully this will be really, I'm very excited, I hope everyone else is very excited to see the books as well. So I guess I will just go ahead and get started here. They did not tell me there was going to be video equipment so hopefully I'll be speaking loud enough to get on the microphone. I'm not. So the first thing when I started doing this internship and we decided I was going to be working with the toy and moveable books, everyone kept asking me well what is a toy and moveable book? And why don't you just call them pop up books? So to answer that, pop up books are essentially a sub category of the toy and moveable book umbrella. And pop up books, you know, they have a 3D structure that sort of pull away from the page. Now I don't have any pop up books pictured here just because it's really the structure that we're probably all most familiar with. The toy and moveable book category encompasses books that are in some way interactive, moveable or, you know, toy like in some fashion. So you have pull tabs, you have lift the flap. On the left there you can see a tunnel book. I'll be talking more about all of these different structures later. So there's just a very wide variety. Some of which we don't even have terms for but you look at and you well this is, you know, it's a book and it's also a toy or it's a book and it's also moveable in some way. The other thing that people always ask me is well what's the oldest book that you're working with or what's the oldest moveable book? And movables actually date back to the middle ages with very often in the medieval books you would have volvelles which are a paper disc that would be attached to the page at the center so it could rotate. And if you stack a couple of them on top of each other then you can, you know, progressively smaller, you can then calculate dates for the church calendar, astrological positions of the stars. And sometimes they used them for making codes and cracking codes. So those are really the earliest moveable structures. But they are not the earliest moveable books for children. So the first book that is a moveable for children and sort of the first toy book was made in the 1700s. Before 1700 there were almost no books produced specifically for children. You know, children would have their perennial favorites like Aesop's fables but they weren't, there were very, very few that were produced specifically for children's uses. Then in the early 1700s you started getting fairy stories, Newbery offered toys with books, you know, which is sort of slowing evolving towards the idea of if you get a toy with the book you, you know, maybe the book itself could be a toy. And so Robert Sayer who was an 18th century book seller in London, about 1765 began experimenting with different ways to make a moveable book. And what he came up with is, now this book is as you can see is from 1814, but it's, this is one of the ones we have at the library. And it's, it is the exact same structure as what Robert Sayer originally did and also the content is very similar to what was ultimately produced around, within like the first 30 years of these books. And so essentially they're called, generally called turn up books, not turnip like the vegetable but turn up. I had a couple of people, I'd say, what, are these like horticultural books? I was like no, no. And so essentially you have a piece of paper that's folded in at the top and bottom. And then when you open the top flap, so here this is depiction of Adam, and you fold up the top and then Adam becomes Eve and now there's a serpent in the tree. And then you fold down the bottom and in this one Eve becomes a mermaid. Of course the problem with these books is that the content all has to be related, you know, pictorially and it's sometimes a little weird. Like you suddenly get a mermaid and then the tree's just having out over there. So sometimes they were more effective than others. Robert Sayer's original book, he relied on the popularity of the Harlequin pantomime theater and you'll see a lot of these toy and moveable books. Generally publishers kind of hedged their bets with let's go with a content that's already really popular. So, you know, we have a toy structure that's exciting and hopefully content that people are also already interested in. And then also these books were very expensive to produce. So I think another reason that is, you know, not having to generate content would cut down some on the production costs. So sometimes these turn up books are actually called Harlequin aids because so many were about the Harlequin pantomime theater. And so with this you, so those were the first sort of lift the flap books which, you know, later evolved into, you know, more traditional lift the flap book structures. And also this book is from much later in I believe 1879. G.W. Carlton and Company produced this magical Mother Goose series. And so it's the same sort of idea but here you have the flap is sort of worked into, it's more of a traditional book structure but you can see the flap here. And here's Little Jack Horner who's eating his Christmas pie. And then you turn the flap and he discovers a plum and is sort of taken aback. It's very dramatic. But of course, you know, again you have to relate the first content to the second which is, can be difficult and is a little bit limiting in terms of your content production. So after these turn up books you get around just in the early 1800s The Temple of Fancy with S and J Fuller produced these paper doll books where you see this is Cinderella who's, she's not the earliest one. The earliest ones were about 1810. You'll also notice in this I don't give exact dates because just a lot of these we really don't have the exact dates for or we can kind of get like it might have been in this five year period because, you know, it was produced at this place and we know they were in this studio during that period, but. So forgive me for the lack of exactness. But these paper doll structures, you would have a head that would then get put into various outfits. So Cinderella was sort of a good one because with any of these you have to have several outfits in order for them to really work. So we have, you know, Cinderella, you know, dressing up versus being a servant in the household. This one's a little bit more elaborate than, we have a book on display Little Henry, who's one of the earlier paper doll books. But Cinderella gets a carriage where as Little Henry does not, just. And the other wonderful thing about this is that the Library of Congress copy of this book actually has a second head which you can see on the right there where she's getting married. And that's not accounted for in other copies. So it's sort of an extra-special, one of the paper doll books. Of course, you know, like all of these these were very expensive to produce. So and they were expensive to buy. They were successful, there were certainly many of them around but the. In sort of the next step in this is that Dean and Son particularly in terms of being a successful book publisher, in the 1840s they really devoted themselves to the children's book trade. Dean and Son was founded by Thomas Dean just before 1800. And ultimately in 1947 he partnered with his son George to form Dean and Son. And that was in 1847. It was around the time that they really started getting into the children's book trade. So here, this is one of sort of their first foray into children's moveable books which is Master Rose. And on display we have Miss Rose which is very similar. And now if you're reading very carefully you'll notice that this was not published by Dean, this book was not published by Dean and Son in London. It was published in New York by someone else, however, the content is essentially, is almost exactly the same as the books originally published by Dean. It's probably just, you know, a pirated American copy. But if you look at the pictures of the original books they're exactly the same. The only difference is in our copy of Miss Rose she announces herself to be an American girl rather than an English girl, but. And it sort of messes up the rhyme, but. It's definitely, again, you know, the content, these were really manufactured to be toys and the content is sometimes not as exciting as you might want. But this at sort of an evolution in some ways of the paper doll form where you can see there's a hole on the left there in each of the pages. And the head just like in the paper doll form, you know, shows through where in this Master Rose is trying on different outfits here. He's dressed like a Turk. Here he's dressed like a Dutchman. And here he is in Spanish dress. And, you know, so it's very similar to the paper doll books but more straightforward in the construction. So the other very interesting thing about Dean and Sons is that they were the first two, they produced what is considered to be the first pop up book. But before the pop up book we have the tunnel book structure. And before I tell you about the tunnel books I'd just like to say we have a wonderful tunnel book on display, it's this book. But we have the most amazing stand for it and it just, it looks so lovely and so I encourage everyone to go over and take a peek through the window and you will get to see the Place Vendome in Paris. This is a German copy, but. Essentially the structure it's probably based on traveling [inaudible] which is the same kind of thing. You have the two stiff front cover and back cover. There's a hole in the front where you look through and then the inside is cut away so that you can see all the way to the back. And it creates sort of an interesting three dimensional effect. And they have the accordion folds along the side or on the top and bottom. So that's what Dean and Son essentially, that idea they took and used to make what is considered to be the first pop up book which is Little Red Riding Hood here. They called them scenic books. And essentially you, there's the full cover. When you open the book you would see, you would be presented with this which you can tell you can't see the text. And there's sort of this gray piece of paper that. But if you pull the ribbon on the side, as you pull it up it was attached to three layers of illustrations and those would come up and so there it is half open. And then you would get this sort of beautiful scenic effect with three layers. So very similar to the tunnel book but, you know, it's each individual page has an illustration. So there's Little Red Riding Hood picking flowers. And there is, I believe in this version it is in fact her father that comes and kills the wolf at the end. So that's and then the other thing that I always have to tell people about with these books is that Dean's has so many advertisements on the inside covers of their books, on the backs of their books advertising their different books. And, you know, in this one it says at the very end of the first paragraph, as however there are less secure imitations of these moveable books that, you know, they're pioneering. Be sure that you have those published by Dean and Son. The other thing that Dean and Son did was they were some of the first people to work with pull tab structures. And here we have the moveable Mother Hubbard and her little dog. This series may have been the first book series to have figures that were actuated by pull tabs. And Mother Hubbard may have been, in England, and Mother Hubbard may have been the first in the series which is a little difficult to say. So this may be the first figure to be actuated by a pull tab in England. But essentially, you know, the pull tab structure is basically what, you know, we know today is you pull the tab and in this case Mother Hubbard curtseys and her dog is bowing to her. It's, you know, a little less dramatic than some of the structures we're used to but it's still, at the time I think it must have been very exciting. So and then further too with the pull tab structure is the dissolving pictures which were introduced in England by Dean in the 1860s. And this book is from 1862. So dissolving pictures again you have a pull tab which is not pictured here but essentially it's a sort of window blind structure where as you pull the tab the slats come over the first picture and create a second picture. So here you have war and then peace. And it's sort of a book of opposites. So Dean also did a lot, Dean did a very wide variety of toy and moveable books which may have been why they wound up being so successful. At one point they had a virtual monopoly on moveable books in England. This book which we have, also have on display is Dean's new book of magic illuminations where if you hold the page to the light pieces of it seem to glow where they would, you know. So they're two pages, the back page is translucent and the front page. I always get confused about the front page and the back page. But essentially you would paint part of it and you'd have the front page cut away and the back page would be painted. So that when you hold it up to the light certain places shined through. So the river wouldn't shine but, you know, the bridge and the moon would shine. And here the lanterns and the rockets, you know, appear to glow. And again we have all these advertisements for, you know, all these books that they published. And in some ways it's a little bit almost sad because, you know, you see these advertisements for these books and, you know, most of these books were owned and used frequently by children. So it's very hard to get our hands on them all the time. And so sometimes you'll be reading the histories and they'll say I've heard of this book, I think this is what it's like but I've never actually been able to see it. But Dean's was certainly very prolific. So Dean was, you know, one of the first dissolving pictures. One of the things about Dean is they sort of introduced a lot of new structures. And then others would take these structures and then really perfect them. So Ernest Nister did amazing dissolving pictures. And this is from the cover of Our Darling Surprise pictures. The other thing that I always get confused on is that most of these books there is another book where the title is almost the exact same as the original book. So this is Our Darling Surprise pictures, that's one of the more unusual ones. But he also had Here and There, Come and Go, Seesaw pictures and they're all a book of changing scenes. So it gets a little confusing. And the other thing too is Nister used to reuse his illustrations periodically. So sometimes you're like is this in Come and Go or Here and There? And here's the cover page. And you can see at the bottom, Ernest Nister, it's very small but it says printed in Bavaria. He printed in Germany but he had offices in London and actually partnered with E. P. Dutton and Company in New York. You know, unlike some of the more early books where, you know, there were just lots of pirated copies on both sides of the Atlantic. This was actually sort of, you know, this was planned and produced accordingly. So here you have the initial illustration with the watchman who appears to be a rooster. Get up at once the watchman cried, I believe he'll sleep till noon. The magpie's broken in your house and stolen your silver spoon. And so here as you pull the tab the illustration begins to change and ultimately it gets changed into the magpie with the silver spoon. This is from Come and Go, a book of changing pictures. And this one we actually know the verses where by F. E. Weatherly. Often times you can often assume they were by F. E. Weatherly but often people were rarely credited specifically for their work in these illustrations. Like Nister may have done a lot of them himself but maybe not because the illustrator's signature would get cropped off. And he also was signed as a lithographer and so it's hard to say. So Weatherly wrote these verses for the modern milkman and very, you know, they're very similar to sort of the nursery rhymes that we know. But this one is about a little cat and dog that, you know, are selling milk and smoking cigars. And the illustration says, the times have altered truly tis no joke, when cats sell milk and puppies try to smoke. You see the cats there, you know, trying to sell milk and as you dissolve the picture slowly you begin to see the puppy. And there he is sort of giving an odd look to the cigar on the table like he's not quite sure about the whole situation. So essentially that ends, most of these books, the Nister, Dean and Son and Meggendorfer who I did not talk about who really, but we have several of his books on display. And he really perfected, did these amazing pull tab structures. That was sort of the first golden age of pop up books. Right now we're considered to be in the second golden age of pop up books which, you know, I think is evident by just the number of toy and moveable books that you see when you go to the bookstore. It's so many of the children's books are, you know, lift the flap or, you know, pop up and it's widely available. But after, roughly around the time of the first World War, you know, the trade between Germany and Britain was severed. And the pop up book production sort of, you know, it didn't stop but it went downhill. It was slower. However, in the 1930s, I have to mention this because it is a pop up lecture. You know, this was between the first and second golden age. We have C. Carey Cloud and Harold Lentz who worked for Blue Ribbon Books. And they produced the first pop up books. But which now you're saying but Little Red Riding Hood was the first pop up book. But the reason I can get away with saying this is that the term pop up was not being used to describe books at that time. Blue Ribbon Books copyrighted it in the '30s and then proceeded to put that term on every single book they published with a pop up picture in and put it in quotation marks. So you can just barely see the quotation marks under the pop up Cinderella. And the other thing, there's a lovely Peter Rabbit over on the table of pop ups there. And you can't see the cover but in terms of truth in advertising they are very truthful. They say Peter, the Tale of Peter Rabbit with pop up picture because there's only one picture in the book. And I have looked that up on the catalog so many times and it says we can't find it. And then I say oh, I said pop up pictures and there's only one, you have. But this is Cinderella and Other Tales. The cover suggests other tales. As soon as you get on the inside it says three other tales, only three. But again you can see the quotation marks around pop up. And this is, you know, this is when we really get the pop up illustrations that we think of today. And they're, you know, this is Cinderella's carriage. And then this is, you know, sort of a view from the front. And one of the things I love about this, some of these pop ups is the detail where you can see here, unfortunately the light's not great, but the coachman further back, there's no face on the back of the head because that's the back of his head. But it's on the front. So they're very, very careful about these things. This is another pop up from the same book. This is Goldilocks and the Three Bears where with Goldilocks running away from the house. And it's a little hard to see here but there's actually a cellophane windowpane in the window which and you can kind of see the, it's shrunk over time whereas the paper hasn't and the paper's a little bit wobbly. But just some of these illustrations are just really, really wonderful. So, just to kind of wrap up the last few remarks is Dean and Son who, you know, like I said they really had for a while the monopoly on pop up books in England. And for a while they were the oldest firm continuously engaged in producing toy and moveable or toy books. They did a lot of different structures, flexible face storybooks which, you know, if you have children you've probably seen the books where you can, there's kind of a puppet in the center of the book that you can put your finger in and move around a little bit. That's what this was. Just a very early version of it. Cloth books they printed on untearable linen. Tunnel books, they'd have these applique structures where to create kind of a three dimensional perspective. It wasn't super successful but they really did just about every form of toy and moveable book imaginable. In the 1980s they were bought by Paul Hamlyn Group although they're still used as an imprint. And so essentially Dean's, you know, was not, did not take these structures really to the furthest extent they could take them. But they introduced a lot of new structures and sort of paved the way for this second golden age of toy and moveable books that we're in now. So and that's, that is my talk. [ audience applause ] >> Thank you Sarah. I think we have time for a couple of questions. >> So when did we start using the term paper engineering? >> Paper engineering. You know, that is a good question that I don't know. Certainly all the research I've done refers to specific people as doing the paper engineering. But, you know, most of these books are from the last 50 years. So I actually don't know the answer to that. I would love to be able to find out. >> Have you found any [inaudible] or examples of pop up books or other toy books of this? >> That was not the main focus of my research. A lot of the books we have are, you know, at the Library of Congress are from the U.S. and Europe, just and so. Because those are the books that are available to study, that's mostly what I did. >> In this collection the Asian materials and the material that would have come from other cultures are likely in the Asian division and African, Middle Eastern division. Both of which have moveable pieces but they wouldn't have been available for our [inaudible]. >> But they do exist and... >> I know that there are Asian, there are Asian books that unfold in ways that constructed shelters and then go back in. >> You said these books were pretty expensive. How expensive were they compared to like a regular non? >> It varied depending on the structure. They were definitely, some of them, the paper doll books were really quite expensive for the time which even though there were the probably a good 10 or 15 ones produced. They really, the don't see them continuing that much. And Dean's in the 1870s, you know, as probably everyone was at the time switched to color printed rather than hand colored to try to cut down on the cost of production. So and then you also get examples of people who probably did not charge enough to really make a profit off of their books. Grimaldi who I did not mention in this talk did a very nice book called A Suit of Armor for Youth which is really very well made. But just wasn't particularly successful and, you know, he likely just couldn't get the cost of production versus what people were willing to pay for a book to work out very well. >> Do you have any idea about what type of volume they were produced in, you know? >> Some of them were in runs of about 200. Again it's very difficult to find good hard numbers on a lot of these books. You know, Meuer actually suggests that the Dean Series of Dissolving Pictures was not particularly successful even though again they did have several runs of them. But it's hard to say. There just, there's not a lot of good factual information or not fact but specific information on them but. >> What was your favorite thing to stumble upon and why would that be different than the others? >> Well I told Jackie I know someone's going to ask me what my favorite was. And I, it, I really don't have a favorite, you know. >> Top three, top three? >> What I finally was thinking was that for each book I have a favorite thing about that book. I will as much as I really love every single book I looked at and particularly all the ones that are on display, I, the illustration that consistently puts a smile on my face is actually in, there's a book right by Mark there that's Buck Rogers 25th Century. And you can see the, well if you come up and look, the characters there are being attacked by a giant reptile. And that's that is what the caption reads, attacked by the giant reptile. So it's, I am fond of that illustration. I... >> Sarah, thanks for the talk, that was really, really great. A couple related questions about periodical press. One, I know that your talk is on books and so you might not have come across it. But were there ever pop up or moveable toy elements in the periodical, you know, like a supplement [inaudible] something like that? The second question is was there a cultural discourse about the encouragement of toy books? Were, did certain educators think this isn't so good, they should be reading Latin instead of [inaudible]. >> The short answer to the second question is yes. There was a definitely a lot of particularly in the late 19th century of, you know, what are these books teaching our children. And, you know, should these stories have a moral? And again sometimes with the content you'll see people trying to shoehorn a moral in and it just doesn't quite work. In terms of periodicals, I really did not come across anything referring to that. And again that may be one of those things that just, it was so ephemeral that there's no way to really know. I'd, it's the toy, the children's book publishing was not, you know, it was very iffy at that time. So if you'll refer the term there were firms popping up and kind of going out of business. I, I can't imagine someone didn't try it I would imagine. But I did not come across anything. >> There were paper dolls in Germany where [inaudible] lithography were a little more popular than the kind of color printing that we're seeing here. There were paper dolls that [inaudible] tear out. And you then build a series of wardrobe over time. But nothing... >> There were some in some advertisements like [inaudible]. There'd be little things that would pop off the page, little props and things like that. >> Where in the [inaudible] that did have quite elaborate structures. For example, one that was originally published in Japan and then came to the United States after World War II. So there are some examples but not really a mainstream American 19th century [inaudible]. >> I seem to remember an issue either in New York Magazine or the New Yorker that had a pop up cover in the past 10 years [inaudible]. I might even have it in a box somewhere. I thought it was pretty unusual. I think it was of a skyscraper. >> That sounds very exciting. I missed that issue. >> That wouldn't be a children's book. >> So I think what we'll do if you, there are a lot of books out here and I'd like you to ask [inaudible] if we can as you've noticed these are very fragile for many reasons. They're produced in the unfortunate period of time in which the scenic paper was popular. They were owned and handled by children. And they have attachments that are 10 years at best. So, one of the things that we work with in this division and it's an expensive proposition is to try and slowly restore these to their full condition. Should there be a moment in which you feel compelled to want to adopt a book we can always talk. But given that, at the moment they are fragile. So if we could have the students that are sitting at the picnic table slowly move away and give them a chance to get away from the table before you all go rushing towards these pop ups. It might be a little safer. And also along here if you can give us just a second or two to clear the chairs away, it'll give you a better chance to see the books without worrying about, without making me worry about [inaudible]. And as we've said every one of these sessions there are lot of people here. We'd be happy to show you whatever you would like to see. And please don't handle the books especially in this case. You do not want to be the person that breaks a Meggendorfer book. You really don't want [inaudible]. But before we do that can we congratulate Sarah. [ Audience Applause ] [ Silence ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. [ Silence ]