THERE’LL be no Wiis in my house this Christmas thank you very much. We watched them being demonstrated at the launch by Nintendo PR girls thrusting, parrying and gesticulating in front of a widescreen TV.

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It immediately made us wonder how long it would be before one of them let the thing slip, sending it crashing through the screen. Wiis don’t have a wrist strap for nothing, but if I was the parent of a youngster expecting one from Santa this Christmas, I be taking out extra insurance.

Oh for the days when children were content with a stocking containing an orange, the latest Dandy or Beano annual, a handful of assorted nuts (still in their shells, of course) and a few simple and inexpensive toys. Ah yes, I remember it well.

Time was when the must-have Christmas present for children and adults alike was a magical

book like the ones illustrated here. In their own way, they were the Victorian equivalent of the Game Boy — and they didn’t need batteries. They are mechanical or metamorphic books, designed to be interactive, their pages changing as the story develops, all at the whim of the reader.

Today’s collectors call them "pop-up books", a catch-all term that covers a multitude of elaborate and innovative three-dimensional and other designs that remain as captivating today as they were a hundred years ago.

Actually, mechanical books have a long history. One of the earliest examples was published in the 13th century by an unlikely sounding character named Ramon Llull (c.1235-1316), who wrote poetry and practiced mysticism on the island of Majorca.

His hand-written complex philosophical texts were illustrated with revolving desks called volvelles which could be rotated around a central pivot to point to words or symbols on the page or predict the future.

In the 14th century, other mechanisms were being used for example in books on anatomy, where flaps could be turned or lifted to show different sections of the body and its organs.

Books specifically intended for juveniles did not appear in any form until the latter half of the 18th century when publisher John Newbery responded to the need to improve children’s education.

Thereafter, it was only a short time before publishers began to experiment with creative and innovative ways to capitalise on the market.

London printer and bookseller Robert Sayer took the lead in about 1765 with the production of "Harlequinades", books named after the pantomime figure, which consisted of pages with two engraved scenes.

  Each scene was split in the centre by a number of flaps, layered one on top of another and attached at the top and bottom of the page, so that each flap could be lifted from the centre.

Each half of a scene was interchangeable with the others so that turning the various flaps created sufficient variations in scenes to keep children amused for hours.

Using a similar technique, the first Paper Doll Books were produced by London publisher S. & J. Fuller from 1810 and in the1820s, miniature portrait painter William Grimaldi developed another type of "lift-the-flap" book referred to as a toilet book.

He devised the idea as a party game, sketching articles from his daughter’s dressing table as  representations of specific virtues. For example, rouge equalled modesty, powder, innocence and the looking glass, humility.

The articles were illustrated on flaps, which, when lifted, revealed scenes illustrating each virtue.

His son Stacy published the first book in 1821 entitled The Toilet, which enjoyed great popularity and inspired a rash of imitations.

Two years later, Stacy published a boy’s book, A Suit of Armour for Youth, also written and illustrated by his father, in which illustrations of moral themes were hidden beneath pieces of armour.

Thomas Dean was the first publisher to produce truly movable books on a large scale. The firm was already in existence at the start of the 19th century but they were among the first to adopt the new lithographic printing process that had been invented in Germany in 1798.

Dean’s "toy books" dominated the market from the 1840s being noted for their beautiful chromolithographic images.

His son George joined the company in 1847 and they opened studios in London where teams of artists devised ever more complex movable books.

In 1856, for example, they released a series of fairy tales adventure stories in "peepshow" style titled New Scenic Books.

Each scene was depicted on three or more cut-out sections placed one behind the other and attached by a ribbon running through them.

The scenes lay flat, face down when the book was closed but when it was opened, the ribbon caused the scenes to pop up giving a three-dimensional view.

In the 1860s, Dean also invented a mechanism to animate a scene by pulling a tab. Advertised as "living pictures", among the best known was the "Royal Punch and Judy as Played before the Queen"

In it, the reader controls the action in a three-dimensional miniature theatre, moving the characters by pulling tabs located at the bottom of each page.

"Home Pantomime Toy Books" was another Dean’s innovation in which the entire subject matter of an image changes as the pages are turned.

Dean dominated the industry for much of the 19th century but in the 1880s, a number of German publishers capitalised on their country’s expertise as specialist lithographic printers and crashed into the European children’s book market.

Leading the attack was Raphael Tuck who moved to England as a young man, working first as a furniture maker. He subsequently began framing and selling pictures and chromolithographs printed in Germany from a wheelbarrow in the streets of London.

In 1866, he opened a small shop and four years later, his sons joined him to open a publishing business in the capital.

The business was a huge success and Tuck later became official Publisher to Queen Victoria.

Father Tuck’s Mechanical Series was a popular series featuring multi-layered three-dimensional scenes, while Fun at the Circus featured pages with three-dimensional overlays designed to be raised out of the book and laid on to the tabletop like a diorama.

They were also printed in both colour and black and white, the latter enabling children (and their parents) to colour them by hand.

Another German publisher who specialised in colourful movable books was Ernest Nister. His company was founded in Nuremberg in 1877 in a city which had been a centre for toy making throughout the 19th century and had the most advanced colour printing in the world.

His speciality was illustrations that stood up automatically. His figures and scenes were die-cut and mounted in a three-dimensional framework connected by paper guides. As the pages are turned, the figures stand to attention in a setting which has its own perspective.

His other forte was movable books with pages made up of dissolving and a revolving slats which cause the images to transform using complex geometric cuts which revolve as tabs are pulled by the reader.

However, the most complex and original movable picture books of the 19th century were produced by a Munich artist called Lothar Meggendorfer.

His illustrations often had five parts which move simultaneously and in different directions using intricate levers hidden between pages. When activated they give the characters and scenes an almost endless range of movement.

Dozens of interlocking parts and intricate rivets make the carpenters chop the wood, the musicians play their horns, and the nurse rock the baby but because of their complexity, the books were the preserve of the wealthy.

Nevertheless, from the 1880s to the 1900s, Meggendorfer’s works enjoyed brisk sales and many reprintings.

Needless to say, the outbreak of the First World War crippled output from both German and British publishers alike. The Second World War dealt the industry another blow and in this day and age of electronic gadgetry, pop-up books are enjoyed and appreciated by a relatively small select few.

I know which camp I’m in.

All are on sale this Christmas and so it was –admittedly with a different cast of characters – since the 1820s, which means there’s a rich collecting vein for lovers of children’s annuals.

When I was a lad, Christmas wasn’t Christmas without a Rupert, Dandy or Beano annual in my stocking.

Why I didn’t keep them I’ll never understand. Today they fetch good prices.

A quick search on eBay confirmed the point. A 1954 Beano annual (I was a toddler then) was up to £150 with 11 bids and four days’ bidding to go.

Another, the owner of which thought was from 1951, was being sold along with the first ever Eagle annual (you remember Dan Dare) from 1950 “both “owned by Dad from new” had reached £72 with 25 minutes to go.

The prices of Rupert annuals were scarier still. One from 1942 had received seven bids and was at £200 with seven days to go.

The amazing thing is that these things still turn up at car boot sales and in charity shops and flea markets and change hands for a fraction of what a collector is prepared to pay, while auction sales are often the source of job lots of dozens of the things that have been slung into cardboard boxes and are sold without reserve.

No one really knows when the first child’s annual was published in this country, although contenders for the earliest include Child Companion Annual, which appeared in 1824, and Children’s Prize (later known only as Prize), published in 1863.

Among my personal early favourites is Chatterbox, which also first appeared in 1863. A mere £30 buys a good, clean example today.

It was followed in 1879 by Boys’ Own Paper and its companion Girls’ Own Paper; Young England in 1880 and Chums in 1893.

The earliest children’s annuals started life as weekly or monthly paper-wrappered pamplets the content of which was largely evangelical.

Each Christmas, a special edition was given a richly printed pictorial title page bearing the date of the issue and the volume number.

The idea was that the year’s issues were bundled together and bound into a single volume.

One of the earliest of these was The Juvenile Magazine, edited by one Lucy Peacock, which didn’t last long. Just 12 monthly issues were published, the last dated December 1788.

Interestingly, the impetus for children’s Christmas annuals was probably the appearance of adult versions.

Forget Me Not, published for adults in 1823, was followed by dozens of others – for all ages. The most enduring was The Children’s Friend, which started life as a monthly penny magazine in 1824 and continued without interruption until 1860.

Until 1850, it was edited by the Rev. William Carus Wilson, who founded the Clergy Daughters’ School at Kirkby Lonsdale which the Bronte sisters were forced to attend.

Charlotte got her own back later, though. She modelled the character Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre on her schooolmaster, a hard taskmaster who was generally disliked by his pupils.

The Boy’s Own Book, published in 1827 and 1828, was among the first real annuals for children. According to its title page, it was “A complete encyclopedia of all the diversions, athletic, scientific, and recreative, of boyhood and youth”.

The Christmas Box; an Annual Present for Children was more like an adult annual and was probably too well produced for its own good. It lasted for only two issues – in 1828 and 1829.

The first colour illustrations ever to appear in a children’s book were published in the 1836 edition of The New Year’s Token; or Christmas Present, a delightful annual that first appeared the previous year.

The illustrations showed George IV’s fishing temple in a delicate view of Virginia Water, in Surrey, which appeared on the frontispiece, while a vignette of a small boy examining a bird’s nest appeared on the title page.

They were printed from woodblocks by the great George Baxter who invented the process of printing with oil colours. The vignette of the boy is one of the rarest of all so-called Baxter prints.

The first real children’s annual in the modern sense was The Excitement, which first appeared in 1830. Contained within its pictorial covers were romantic adventure stories such as “A Lion Hunt in Africa” “Whale Ship Destroyed by a Whale” and “Sufferings Endured in the Black-Hole of Calcutta”.

The fact that The Excitement contained no religious tracts caused consternation in some quarters to the point where the editor, one Adam Keys, an Edinburgh schoolmaster, was forced to resign.

Undaunted, he set up a new annual, which he named, aptly enough, The New Excitement, first published in 1838.

The Boy’s Own Paper was among the longest running early monthly magazines which survived from 1879 until its final appearance in 1967.

A spin-off, The Boy’s Own Annual, published in a pictorial cloth binding, was issued regularly until the outbreak of the Second World War but was then dormant for 26 years until it reappeared at Christmas, 1964.

The Girl’s Own Paper was without doubt the most famous equivalent for girls which ran from 1880 to 1948. It appeared each year-end as The Girl’s Own Annual.

By about 1900, publishers began to move away from the practice of offering annuals that were simply bound versions of what had been printed in weekly or monthly installments throughout the year.

Pioneers were Blackie’s Children’s Annual, published first in 1904, and, in 1909, Empire Book For Boys (and Girls).

However, the massive growth in children’s annuals began in earnest after the first war. Amalgamated Press, which was enjoying huge sales of its weekly comics, saw annuals as a way of enhancing profits even further.

Titles included Puck (1921); Tiger Tim (1922); Rainbow; and Bubbles (both 1924) followed in the next decade by Funny Wonder (1935); Jester Annual (1938) and Chips Annual (1939).

D.C.Thomson, the Scottish rival to Amalgamated Press issued Adventureland in 1924; Rover (1926); Skipper (1932) Hotspur (1935) and Wizard (1936).

Newspapers too were quick to get in on the act. They had been printing cartoon strips since the early 1920s in order to attract a younger readership and it quickly dawned on executives that here was material for an annual.

The Daily Mirror started the ball rolling with its Pip, Squeak and Wilfred Annual in 1920, followed by the Daily Herald’s Bobby Bear in 1922.

In the same year the Daily Sketch produced Uncle Oojah and in 1934 the Daily Mail weighed in with Teddy Tail.

Not to be outdone, in 1937 the Daily Express harnessed the pulling power of its Rupert the Bear strip and introduced annuals which continue to this day.

Somehow, I don’t think builder Bob will last the course!

antiques@chris-proudlove.co.uk

Pictures show:

This 1954 Beano annual was up to £150 on eBay with 11 bids and four days’ bidding to go.
Boys Illustrated Annual, published in time for Christmas 1894. It marked the end of an era, Boys magazine being taken over by Boy’s Own Paper

Leading Strings “The Baby’s Annual” published in 1925 and worth only a few pounds
Annual3

Rupert Stories, written by Mary Tourtell, creator of the comic strip character, and published in 1947