But Are They ‘Real’ Books?

Once confined to the shelves of newsagents and the gift trade, the last decades have seen an avalanche of novelty publishing (board, cloth, flap, touch and feel, pop-up etc) from all the big players. But despite this embarrassment of riches, novelty publishing has remained sidelined in critical debates about children’s literature. So what is a novelty book? What sort of relationship should there be between technology and the other elements that come together to make a successful book? Brian Alderson looks at the history of novelty publishing and assesses and categorises examples from the current crop of titles.

Looking bleakly at about sixty recently published ‘novelty books’ I wonder what the creator of The Toilet would have made of them.

Not of course the eminent Thomas Crapper (whose invention could, nonetheless, be serviced by quite a lot of children’s books that come to mind), but Stacey Grimaldi, the antiquary, whose little book called The Toilet was published in 1821 and can be accounted among the earliest of all English novelty books. ‘Toilet’ here referred to the equipment of a lady’s dressing-table. Each leaf of the book had a hand-coloured engraving of some item such as ‘Fine Lip Salve’ affixed centrally on a flap. When the flap was raised the emblematic significance was revealed, in that case ‘cheerfulness’.

Early examples

The Toilet was one of a number of attractive novelties for children that were published at the start of the nineteenth century – a period of rich invention, too much neglected by today’s commentators, who seem to think that everything before Alice was gloomy didacticism. You had, for instance, a strip-cartoon panorama for a version of ‘The Old Woman and her Pig’; you had hand-coloured picture-sheets that might also be published as booklets or jig-saw puzzles; you had elegant doll-dressing books; and you had books of scenes accompanied by dozens of cut-out figures who could be eased into a multitude of slots cut in the pages.

The first pop-ups

Mucking about thus with conventional books later proved to be a source of profitable pleasure, one way or another, to Victorian publishers and children alike. By 1860 the pop-up book had been devised (pull a ribbon and a theatrical scene rises from the page) and by the end of the century almost all the natty dodges found in the present heap of new books have been perfected. The German printer and publisher Ernest Nister, who operated chiefly from a London office, produced the greatest variety of ingenuities: sliding slats, dissolving discs, multi-layered pop-up scenes etc., and a fellow-countryman, Lothar Meggendorfer, engineered the most wondrous of articulated comic movables. A tailor leans over an ironing-board. Pull a single tab and he nods his head, moves the iron with his right hand, takes away his left hand, while a rat at the end of the board flicks its tail. (A number of these Victorian and Edwardian movables have been produced in facsimile by firms like HarperCollins in recent years. If you want the originals though, you must dig deep. I have just received a catalogue from an American dealer in which a copy of Nister’s Magic Moments c.1890 is listed at $1250.)

New technological developments?

While very few developments have taken place in the technology of novelty books in the last hundred years (the introduction of miniature batteries, permitting an endless repetition of ‘Jingle Bells’, hardly counts as advancement) so too there has been very little progress in the critical recognition of what counts as complete success in the making of the books. The buying public – adults and children alike – ask chiefly that they be gob-smacked by the ingenuity of the product rather than that they find everything between the covers adding up to a satisfying whole. Ellen, or the naughty girl reclaimed (1811) may have afforded great pleasure to children who could dress the wayward infant in dunce’s cap or whatever as the story required, but the words themselves have been chiefly valuable to satirists like Hilaire Belloc:

This little girl whom now you see,

To mind mamma will not agree,

And though her face is fair and mild,

You view a stubborn, naughty child…

and many a vigorous folktale is hashed up to provide copy for the paper engineers.

Ambitious assemblages

Since the huge resurgence of novelty books began in the 1960s the same thing has happened to ‘children’s classics’. Everything from Alice to Good night Moon can find itself sacrificed to the not inexhaustible pleasures of tab-pulling, flap-raising, disc-turning and picture-popping. Very often the individually-designed books that exploit one or two simple mechanisms end up by working more coherently as books than more ambitious assemblages. It is easy to see why the children’s librarians of 1979 selected Jan Pienkowski’s Haunted House (Heinemann) to win the Kate Greenaway Medal. It is a virtuoso display of at least ten variant movable mechanisms – but Pienkowski’s Dinner Time of a year later (Gallery Five Ltd) gets a more dynamic drama from one simple device. Each page opening uses the principle of the ‘V-fold’ pop-up, so that as you open the leaves an animal’s jaws are projected towards you, opening and closing as you move the hinge. In a chain of predacity that may surprise naturalists, frog is eaten by vulture is eaten by gorilla…etc., leading to a simple climax whose force owes everything to the way in which the absurd sequence is matched by the design and comic depiction of the pop-ups.

Critical confusion

Given the propensity these days to invent an award for Absolutely Everything, it is a bit surprising that none is as yet in existence for movable books – and, trawling through Ruth Allen’s recent, and very naive, Children’s Book Prizes (Ashgate), I can find only one other outright prizewinner to go with Haunted House: the Greenaway Medal for the Ahlbergs’ Jolly Christmas Postman in 1991. Such a side-lining of what is one of the most prominent developments in recent children’s book publishing could be seen as a kind of evidence first for professional suspicion that movables do not really count as children’s books and second for critical confusion about how they can be assessed. This seems to me to be unnecessarily exclusive and when I compare the invigorating work of illustrators like Rod Campbell, or Colin and Jacqui Hawkins, or Maureen Roffey, with the often overblown or pretentious work of people who do win prizes then my doubts about the graphic judgement of our present arbiters of taste are sharpened. At the same time I wonder how far there may be a lack of ‘historical’ or comparative awareness which inhibits reviewers from seeing individual examples of movables within their own context. (‘Historical’ is given those quotes in the hopes of indicating less an awareness of nineteenth-century precursors, than of the hundreds of movables that have flooded on to the market in the last thirty years.)

Categories of novelty

In an effort to bring at least a degree of order to assessing the movables of 1998 I therefore propose to deal with them in categories related to the foremost modus operandi that they employ, with rather a lot of items ending up in the ‘mixed methods’ section. Despite some very elaborate get-ups, most examples fall within a fairly predictable, run-of-the-mill tradition, and I have reserved to the end two books which strike me as bringing a high degree of playful originality to the genre. (To save space only authors and illustrators are named among the credits. Production teams often include any number of editors, designers, paper engineers and other dogsbodies.)

Board Books

Although there was a time when these were regarded as products sold only in stationers and sub-post-offices, they have now become so widely used that such recent arrivals as Helen Oxenbury’s ‘Big Board Books’ are really part of the conventional picture-book, rather than novelty, market. The four titles All Fall Down, Clap Hands, Say Goodnight, and Tickle, Tickle give close-up, snapshot drawings of four variably-featured, moon-faced toddlers bouncing, banging and sploshing their way through the day (Walker Books, £3.50 each).

Shaped Books

These are ‘novelty books’ mostly by virtue (such as it is) of being die-cut round the edges so that they have the outline of some person or object featured in the text. Tug Boat (Dorling Kindersley, £3.99) – incidentally also a board book – opens up to reveal the interior of the boat, an actual model, photographed and peopled by plasticine figures from the Wallace-and-Gromit team. Events, of a kind, occur as you turn through the five page-openings but the ‘story’ is purposeless to the point of stupidity. Nor can many better things be said about Judy Paterson’s ‘Fidgets’ series, four paperback booklets uniformly shaped like a short-fingered glove (Bloomsbury, £2.99 each). The Fidget family who inhabit these objects are worked up from Judy Paterson’s fingerprints and the laboured stories about them rely heavily on repetitions, sometimes with rhymes, of words like Didget, Gidget, Widget, Smidget and yellow wellies. The graphics make almost no use of the books’ cut-out shape.

Folded Leaf Books

The right-hand leaf in each page-opening folds out to reveal a second picture below the one that you see first. Spotted Yellow Frogs by Matthew Van Fleet (Ragged Bears, £7.99) makes clever use of this by showing, say, a ‘zig zag red ball’, but when you fold back the leaf one edge of the ball is revealed as the back of a beetle in a zig zag red beetle family. Various other shapes – pyramid, cube etc. – are put to similar use and the final opening can be extended into a five-panel panorama with the animals nesting below appropriately shaped and coloured flaps.

Horizontal Split Leaf Books

Each leaf is divided horizontally, one or more times, and the illustrations are so drawn that the upper and lower portions will fit together whatever sections are turned. Nick Sharratt’s A Cheese and Tomato Spider (André Deutsch, £8.99), as you may guess, also supplies combinable captions. Since the book has twelve leaves there is scope for plenty of permutations, some of which (eg. ‘Cor!! An exploding man’) work very much better than others (eg. ‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello! A police volcano’).

Vertical Split Leaf Books

A bit like the Folded Leaf Books above, but here the picture-change is internalised with the picture on each page-opening changing as an inserted half-leaf is turned. If I Were an Animal by ‘Woody’ (Bloomsbury, £7.99) has illustrations in the current gross-nursery style – heavy magic-marker outlines, powerful colours – and one element in the first picture, say a little girl’s spotted sock, connects into the new picture when the inner leaf is turned: a spotty horse’s leg. All the participants gather together for a party at the end.

Hole Books

Holes punched in leaves need to be organised for two-way looking. Anni Axworthy’s Guess What I Am (Walker Books, £5.99) does this quite well by showing you part of an animal through one side of the hole and – when you’ve guessed what it is and turned the page – showing you a companion creature making a (rather weak-minded) comment on the other side. A second book in the series, Guess What I’ll Be works less well, since the fur or feathers seen one way are of little consequence and the return comments are even more weak-minded.

Richard Brassey’s adaptation of novelty techniques on behalf of the animal welfare movement, Look Into Their Eyes, has just come out as a paperback (Dolphin, £4.50). The view of animals looking through bars changes as the page is turned to what they might see in their natural habitat – an affecting device, with Brassey’s brief, marginal commentary pointing up the dilemmas of conservation.

The Ahlbergs’ Peepo!, the hole book which began the recent fashion for such things, has just been issued as a board book in smaller format – a very successful adaption (Viking, £4.99).

Lift the Flap Books (successors, of course, to The Toilet)

The huge popularity of Eric Hill’s ‘Spot’ series probably had a very persuasive influence on publishers looking for a natty and not too expensive novelty process and flap-lifting is incorporated into dozens of books, often with very little justifiable point.

Novelty books may well be an ideal play-way for children learning their letters, as witness Robert Crowther’s classic Amazing Hide and Seek Alphabet Book (Viking, 1977), but Richard Edwards and Sue Hendra’s Amazing Animal Alphabet ‘with fantastic flaps’ (OUP, £9.99) warrants neither of those gasping adjectives. The relentless sequence of questions in verse is tedious, the flat patterning of the art-work is ungainly and the uniform trapdoor-style flaps at the bottom of each page have parsimoniously been left plain white on their undersides.

Similarly Sian Tucker’s Look With Me. What Do You See? (Orchard, £8.99) scatters a few liftable flaps through its own ungainly pages, but without any creative engagement with the book’s purpose in having the child-reader identify objects. Elmer Plays Hide-and-Seek by David McKee (Andersen, £6.99) operates at the same elementary level but stands forth as a model of how the job should be done. Elmer the patchwork elephant is hunting for Bird. That provides a reason for looking behind flaps and although Elmer’s mistakes seem repetitious you know that they are working towards a fitting climax, and McKee’s simple text and sparkling graphics make the entertainment a coherent whole.

Two other flap books deserve mention for more particular reasons. Shoo Rayner’s Hey Diddle Diddle and Other Mother Goose Rhymes (Dutton, £8.99) looks predictable enough at first sight, apart from the jolly device of fives toes separately raised for ‘This little piggy’. But on closer acquaintance the reader will see that lifting the flaps is only part of a sequence of pictorial jokes that thread their way very satisfyingly backwards and forwards through the selection of rhymes.

As for Whose House? (HarperCollins, £10.99), connoisseurs of novelty books will suddenly find themselves confronted by madcap Colin and Jacqui Hawkins subdued under the spell of the Ahlbergs. Not only is the idea for the book and its versification an echo of Allan, with various nursery-tale characters making their way to their cottages, houses, or castles (which open up to show the interior decoration and plumbing), but the delicate sepia line-work, the gentle water-colours, and the bonhomie of the characters seem to owe everything to Janet. The persistent plundering of this style by Laurence and Catherine Anholt (currently on view in the lift-the-flap paperback of Can You Guess? (Lincoln, £4.99) is known to all – but what a transformation it has worked on the creators of the peerless Mig the Pig and friends.

Lift the Flap, Pull the Tab

Such are the instructions on the two latest ‘Maisy’ books by Lucy Cousins: Happy Birthday Maisy and Maisy at the Farm (Walker Books, £7.99 each). Their eight predecessors should be known to most readers of BfK who will thus also know how well Lucy Cousins enhances her sense of where to make use of flaps that open on the page with simple but ingenious tab movements. Pull a tab and Maisy’s birthday-cards come tumbling through the letter-box (one can be opened too); pull another tab and, Meggendorfer-like, a lamb drinks milk from a bottle and wags its tail. Such quiet excellence rather shows up the crudity and obviousness of more rough-and-ready competitors like Ken Wilson-Max’s Max (David Bennett, £7.95) where blunt orders ‘Pull’, ‘Lift’, ‘Turn’ are printed on the pictures. Even the one pièce de resistance, a green jelly, carries the note ‘Wiggle up and down!’

Simple Pop-Ups

It is difficult not to see Keith Faulkner and Jonathan Lambert’s The Wide-Mouthed Frog (Madcap/Deutsch, £5.99) as plagiarizing Pienkowski’s Dinner Time, noted above, by applying in a much larger format his idea of animals’ mouths snapping at you from the book’s centre-fold (the frog is almost a copy of its predecessor). The story is barely existent, but does end with a dramatic splash.

And the end of Colin McNaughton’s Journals of Count Dracula (Walker Books, £10.99) is the only excuse for including the book in this article. The eighteen pages of the Journals themselves consist of illustrated documentary evidence for the Count’s biography (eg. ‘My Schooldays’ at Dr Frankenstein’s School for Little Monsters, with its motto of ‘We’ll make a man of you’), but when you get to the casket of the Count’s remains it opens with a dreadful creaking and fully-accoutered, green-visaged incumbent rises to greet you.

Pop-Ups Plus

The huge market for novelties that has been fashioned and the sophisticated production processes that have been developed in Colombia, Ecuador, Singapore, Thailand… have given the creators of movable books great scope for incorporating multiple gimmicks within one pair of covers and well over a dozen of the present batch of books combine simple lift-the-flap or pull-the-tab devices with varying kinds of pop-up or with pictures that are transformed by turning wheels or pulling slats etc. Some of these multiplex objects take on an educational role which may be crudely explanatory like Steven Avgarde’s Here Comes the Fire Engine (Orion, £9.99) and Richard Fowler’s semi-narrative Pop-Up Trucks (Transworld, £12.99); or they may be madly incoherent like Kate Petty and Jenny Maizels’s The Terrific Times Table Book (The Bodley Head, £12.99), whose chaotic pages are so full of gimmickry and exclamations that they could make Einstein innumerate in three minutes flat; or they may be serious, if breathless, educational aids like Jay Young’s Even More Amazing Science Pop-Up Book (Watts, £15.99) – complete with cardboard binoculars, balances, and phenakistoscopes – which turn out to be kits rather than books.

As so often is the case, the most original and rewarding of these factual pop-ups comes from Robert Crowther with his ‘pop-up book of amazing facts and feats’ Deep Down Under Ground (Walker Books, £12.99). In a series of five colour-spreads he goes caving, mining, underwater exploring, tunneling and travelling, interlarding his fine graphic displays with both ‘amazing facts’ and comic asides by participating characters. On the other side of these colour-openings however Crowther shows you the guts of the paper engineering and includes more information about Things Underground and also the problems of constructing movable books.

The varying of mechanisms found in explanatory books has a modest practical value. Slide up panels and see a fire engine’s hose-bay and pump-bay; pull a mechanical mole along the gallery of a mine. But, as has already been noted, movables in picture books or story books may often be their own raison d’être. Ian Whybrow and Axel Scheffler’s The Christmas Bear (Macmillan, £9.99) and The Secret Fairy Handbook ‘as told by the fairies to Penny Dann’ (Orchard, £9.99) are pointless jumbles of gimmickry, and Annie Ate Apples by Lynette Ruschak and Bonnie Matthews, ‘a lift-the-flap, pull-the-tab, turn-the-wheel, pop-up alphabet book’ (Dorling Kindersley, £9.99), while also forming a whirligig anthology of paper-engineering techniques, at least gets points for being a ludicrous satire on conventional alphabet books (see, for instance Ulrich untangling unicorns, or Victor vaporizing vegetables).

Given that Sam McBratney’s Guess How Much I Love You has appeared in a multiplicity of guises already, a pop-up reworking of Anita Jeram’s illustrations was only to be expected (Walker Books, £9.99). We aren’t told if any paper engineers were involved in the design, so if Anita devised the movables herself she is much to be congratulated. The varied movements, no more than one to a page, key in closely with the text so that they augment it rather than distract. And another ‘mixed medium’ sequence which is clever, without overdoing things, is the latest addition to David A Carter’s exemplary ‘Bugs’ series: Bedtime Bugs (Orchard, £9.99). You even get a bonus in the form of ‘Hush Little Buggies’, a 12-page miniature pop-up book incorporated as the Bugs’ bedtime storybook.

Miscellany

The old idea of providing loose figures to be slotted into parts of pages has recently been revived, a procedure which hasn’t encouraged much sparkling wit in books like I’m Silly Spider and Mole’s Summer Story by David Wood and Richard Fowler (Transworld, £6.99 each). Gus Clarke’s Lucy’s Bedtime Book (Andersen, £8.99) is much more thoughtfully organised, with 10 different objects – toys, teddy-bear etc – to slot into each page or with some nice supplementary tab-pull surprises as well. (Andersen have also just published the latest of Paul Dowling’s colour-change books: Sally’s Amazing Colour Book [£8.99]. Dowling is the chief exponent of acetate pictures superimposed upon duplicate scenes so that when you pull a tab a black and white drawing turns into a coloured one – an almost hypnotically attractive device.)

A quantity of other experimental works have also been published recently, ranging from Dexter Gets Dressed! by Ken Wilson-Max (Kingfisher, £8.99), which incorporates fabrics, zips, buttons and boot-laces into the enterprise, to things which are apparatus or toys rather than books (eg. You Are the Store Detective by Richard Brassey [Orion, £9.99] which opens up rather like a game-board and has a battery that operates a lift to help you seek a thief – my lift’s conked out).

Without doubt the most startling of the quasi-toys is Nick Butterworth’s Four Feathers in Percy’s Park (Collins, £16.99). The story about Percy and the animals losing things is fatuous in the extreme – present only as an excuse for the construction of a large 4-section model of parts of Percy’s park, complete with pop-up adjuncts like a see-saw and roundabout in the recreation-ground and air-borne ducks over the maze. It may not be a book, but Meggendorfer would have been proud of it.

Accolade

If the criteria for a successful novelty book require a unity of form and content, so that the gimmicks cohere with and enhance the purpose of the book then David Pelham’s Say Cheese! (Cape, £8.99) seems to me to come closest in all this array to doing that. Grandma Mouse here sends invitations to all the family to come to her place for a new family photograph. The book, which is shaped like a wedge of cheese, follows the progress of events with a trippingly-rhymed text and a sequence of brilliantly devised, beautifully-coloured V-fold pop-ups, culminating in a tremendous double-spread exclamation. The thing is a model of perfectly attuned rhythm and detail.

And by way of a supplement, David Pelham’s Skeleton in the Cupboard (Cape, £6.99) bids fair to compete. Here we get the skeleton himself jigging around within the front cover of the book, and after three page-openings we get a (modest) shock conclusion, accompanied by materials to make your own dancing skeleton. It doesn’t quite have the rich flavour of Cheese but it confirms David Pelham as one of our most ingenious Movable Inventors.

Further Reading

‘Movable Books’ by Geoff Fox in Children’s Book Publishing in Britain Since 1945 ed Kimberley Reynolds and Nicholas Tucker (Scholar Press 1 85928 236 9)

‘Novelty Books and Movables: Questions of Terminology’ in the Children’s Books History Society Newsletter No.61, July 1998. Enquiries to the Secretary of the CBHS, 25 Field Way, Hoddesdon, Herts EN11 0QN

Historical Children’s Book Collections which include novelty

The Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood in London owns the 80,000 volume Renier Collection of early English children’s books reflecting the period from 1585 to 1988.

The collection contains over 500 examples of the movable book, dating from the mid-19th century. Enquiries to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA. Tel: 0181 983 5200

The Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired the Opie Collection of Folklore and Nursery Rhymes which includes some movable books. Enquiries to The Bodleian, Broad Stree, Oxford OX1 3BG (tel: 01865 277000)

Brian Alderson is the chief children’s book consultant for The Times.