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“Listening to Lothar Meggendorfer’s Nineteenth-Century Moving Picture Books”

Amanda M. Brian Abstract: Lothar Meggendorfer (1847-1925) designed bestselling children’s books for German and Anglo-American markets at the turn of the twentieth century. He has been heralded as a genius for his moving illustrations. His moving picture books have been examined by scholars and admirers as a visual medium, but they really engaged readers’ multiple senses. This article reexamines Meggendorfer’s works to recognize a past reading experience that involved sound and touch as well as sight. Meggendorfer was quite invested in representing sound, including music, and his masterpieces reveal both past practices of listening and fin-de-siècle soundscapes, or sonorous environments. By focusing on expressions of sound as well as sight in Meggendorfer’s designs, this study contributes to the growing understanding of modernity as more than a visual enterprise.

When the famed American illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) described the

German illustrator Lothar Meggendorfer (1847-1925) as the “supreme master of

animation,” he expressed the admiration of fans of Meggendorfer’s children’s books for

more than a century.i Meggendorfer’s works were very popular in Europe and the United

States during his lifetime, and as contemporary facsimiles and in recent exhibits, they

continue to delight audiences old and young to this day. The American pop-up book artist

Robert Sabuda, who won the first Meggendorfer Prize awarded by the Movable Book

Society in 1998, has described his longevity this way: “Lothar Meggendorfer used to really

freak people out. Actually, Lothar Meggendorfer still freaks people out, and with good

reason. His movable books—those of pop-ups, pull tabs, image wheels—raised the bar for

the craft of paper engineering during his heyday in the late 1800s. They were absolutely

stunning.”ii Meggendorfers, as the movable books are known, remain captivating for both

their ingenious mechanics and their humorous images.iii

These books were clearly part of a modern culture that emphasized the visual. In

children’s literature, words retreated and pictures dominated as printing techniques and the

graphics trade improved and grew in the nineteenth century—nowhere so quickly as in

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Meggendorfer’s native Bavaria.iv This was part of a larger phenomenon involving vision,

for scholars have interpreted modernity itself as an ocular enterprise. Martin Jay has noted

that “our culture as a whole” as well as “our ordinary language” has been “marked by

[vision’s] importance.”v More recently, scholars have challenged this interpretation of

modernity, noting the interplay of senses and the complexity of experiences. Moving

picture books were certainly more than their illustrations, since they invited a tactile and, I

will argue, an auditory interaction with the engineered paper. Meggendorfers impeded still,

silent reading. In repeatedly illustrating sounds, often animal noises and musical

instruments, Meggendorfer played with connecting senses, perhaps anticipating the

medium of film that so powerfully demonstrates the interdependence of seeing and

hearing.vi This article thus explores a history of sound in modern culture through Lothar

Meggendorfer’s moving picture books.

Meggendorfer Renaissance Meggendorfers have been regularly acclaimed by collectors as invaluable items due

to their brilliance and rarity and have been routinely cited by scholars as examples of early

movable illustrations in children’s literature.vii While Meggendorfer has recently received a

great deal of attention, he was neither the first nor only innovator of moving picture books.

The London publishing firm of Thomas Dean in the 1850s and 1860s and the German

publisher Ernest Nister (1842-1909) have been equally credited with advancing techniques

in paper engineering and color printing.viii Under the name Dean & Son, the London firm

produced movable hand-colored lithographic illustrations in diverse children’s books. It

certainly claimed to be the “originator” of “amusing colored children’s books” in

advertisements.ix These books employed a variety of locomotion, including slat-

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transformations, whereby four horizontal bars that together completed a picture were

replaced by pulling a tab that slid four new bars over the original image to create a new

scene—one image was seen to “dissolve” into another scene. In Dean’s Little Red Riding

Hood, dated around 1855, the pull of a ribbon threaded through metal grommets raised a

pop-out panorama of the key events. It produced a peepshow of layered cutouts, creating a

three-dimensional illusion.x The firm priced such books between one and four shillings,

and held a “virtual monopoly on movable books for many years.”xi

Another force in this field, Ernest Nister, began his printing business in Nuremberg

in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. He then expanded into the Anglo-American

market, opening a publishing house in London in 1888 and partnering with New York

publisher E. P. Dutton and Company. He subsequently became best known for his English-

language children’s books still produced in Nuremberg.xii Nister employed a team of

predominately British illustrators, who produced a distinctive style of cherubic children

and anthropomorphized animals in idealized nature, and authors. In comparison to

Meggendorfer’s books, Nister’s, like Our Darlings’ Surprise Pictures and Come and Go:

A Book of Changing Pictures, both employing slat transformations, appear sentimental.

The illustrations were “extremely well-executed oil-color print[s],”xiii and the mechanics of

the dissolving pictures as well as the pop-up panoramas that opened with the simple turn of

a page were impressive. They have found their well-deserved admirers today and have

been reproduced by the Philomel division of Putnam.xiv Like Nister books, Meggendorfers

also circulated in a German-English publishing nexus.

When the New York book dealer Justin G. Schiller purchased and then prepared in

1975 a catalog of a cache of production files found in Jakob Ferdinand Schreiber’s

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Esslingen warehouse for what was believed to be the entire surviving Meggendorfer

archive, a certain frenzy for Meggendorfers occurred in the world of antiquarian books.xv

In Schiller’s The Publishing Archive of Lothar Meggendorfer, Sendak, as a fellow master,

connoisseur, and collector of children’s literature, beautifully described Meggendorfer’s

mega-appeal. His images were cartoonish in the bold lines and vivid, but flat, colors of

lithography, and so it is his manipulation of the images, bringing them to life, for which he

has been steadily admired. Meggendorfer, according to Sendak, “turned the mechanical toy

book into a work of art. . . . every gesture, both animal and human, coarse and subtle,

amazingly was conveyed via the primitive but, in his hands, versatile technic [sic] of

moveable paper parts.”xvi

The 1970s witnessed a resurgence in toy or moveable books and revived an interest

in Lothar Meggendorfer’s books.xvii Between 1979 and 1982, five of his most popular

works were reissued and reproduced, culminating in a kind of anthology of his work, The

Genius of Lothar Meggendorfer, in 1985.xviii Produced at the behest of Intervisual

Communications Inc. and published by Random House in New York, Genius not only

introduces the man to a new generation and extols the virtues of the samples found inside

(Sendak once again sang his praises in this later work), but also exposes the inner workings

of a single image. Meggendorfer, we learn, began his career as an author and illustrator for

the satirical magazine Fliegende Blätter and also contributed to the famous print series

Münchener Bilderbogen. The Munich-based publisher of the Bilderbogen, Braun &

Schneider, became the first publisher of his movable books for children. He began to

create the books for which he is now known in the late 1880s until interrupted by World

War I and remained in and around Munich, creating puppets and giving puppet-theater

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performances in his later years. In his long career, he may have produced two hundred

books, but the records of his first publisher were completely destroyed.xix

In the late nineteenth century, Meggendorfers were both extremely popular and

relatively expensive due to their technical innovations. They enjoyed multiple German

editions and were translated into many European languages, including French, Italian,

Spanish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Russian. His works were particularly welcome in

English translations in Great Britain, while fewer were found on the American market. But

he created illustrations for cartoons in the Chicago Tribune in 1906. The late-twentieth-

century facsimiles included both German and English texts as well.xx This transatlantic

circulation of movable children’s books was also facilitated by the fact that most were

made in Germany, which “led the field in publishing expertise.” Despite “the superiority of

German machinery” that kept Germany at the top of this publishing world until the advent

of World War I, movable children’s books were as difficult to produce in the late

nineteenth century as the late twentieth century, for much of the labor had to be done by

hand.xxi Literary scholar Michelle Ann Abate has mentioned that the hand labor involved

“cutting, arranging, and affixing the paper engineering” as well as “coloring the full-page

lithographs.”xxii In the twentieth century, this work has been out-sourced to Singapore,

Hong Kong, and Colombia, where die-cutting machines cut and score press-sheets that

hundreds of young women in assembly lines carefully and quickly assemble.xxiii

The production process was complicated because Meggendorfer’s works employed

a variety of mechanisms to produce mobility, including optical illusions, slat-

transformations, rotating wheels, flap-transformations, pull-tabs, and panoramas. The

mechanics were impressive, as a single pull-tab could produce multiple synchronous

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motions on the page. As moveable book scholar Ann Montanaro has noted, “Meggendorfer

was not satisfied with only one action on each page. . . . He devised intricate levers, hidden

between pages, that gave his characters enormous possibilities for movement.”xxiv

Examining the innards of one of Meggendorfer’s pull-tab pages in, say, his popular title

Immer Lustig! (Always Funny!) or Lustiges Automaten-Theater (Merry Company) reveals

a seeming tangle of paper levels swiveling on small flexible copper rivets that when tugged

make the paper dance.

In an age of increasingly mechanized production, partially handcrafted

Meggendorfers were thus steeply priced between five to six marks.xxv The price reflected

their technical innovations. One recognized masterpiece, Internationaler Circus, retailed

for seven marks fifty pfennigs. The 1889 panoramic book unfolded to create a miniature

six-sided circus tent, while pull-tabs below the human and animal performers set the scene

to life. There were four hundred fifty individually drawn people in the audience as well.

This was no conventional animated book, but even the conventional movable

Meggendorfers were out of reach for working-class purchasers. Entrepreneur and founder

of Intervisual Communications Inc. Waldo H. Hunt has noted that six marks was “the

equivalent, for example, of a week’s pay for one of Schreiber’s [female] colorists.”xxvi

Hunt has been a key figure in “reviv[ing] the pop-up book industry” and in reproducing

original Meggendorfers “remarkably true to their antique prototypes.”xxvii In spite of the

originals’ price tags, the books sold by the thousands; Internationaler Circus alone ran

seven editions, and editions of other works could run in the ten thousands.xxviii

Other picture books by Meggendorfer, nominally non-movables like Der

Gänsegeneral . . . Drei lustige Geschichten, could be purchased for as little as one mark,

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while even some movables with as few as six mechanical pages, like Verschiedene Leute

were on sale for two marks fifty pfennigs, suggesting a broader range of purchasers than

previously considered.xxix At least one title, an ABC book, with illustrations by

Meggendorfer and verses by Ferdinand Fedigl was produced as both a non-movable and a

movable, with rotating wheels circling through objects beginning with the letter featured

on the page, presumably for different prices.xxx Meggendorfers, albeit still luxury

commodities, could be purchased at different price points, and by 1902, sales of

Meggendorfers reached over one million.xxxi Considering these numbers, relatively few of

the original Meggendorfers have survived. Their child audience—reminders to be gentle in

prefaces notwithstanding—were particularly rough with the movables. Those preserved in

libraries are often damaged, attesting to their earlier, non-cataloguing owners; I have also

seen heroic conservation efforts, and the collection at the Cotsen Children’s Library of the

Princeton University Library is particularly impressive for its range of originals. So, while

Meggendorfer’s works have experienced a renaissance, admiration rather than analysis has

driven the discussion.

Listening

Meggendorfer’s children’s books were designed to be bodily experienced—so

much so that children had to be warned about the physical handling of the material—but

the full multi-sensory engagement of “reading” such books has rarely been considered by

scholars. Take, for example, the movable lion in Always Funny! The lion stood alone,

dominating the page in a ready stance with his shaggy mane and face angled to directly

confront the audience. A pyramid with two framing palm trees in the background

represented an exotic African location, while sun-bleached bones scattered between the

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lion’s paws illustrated the animal’s carnivorous nature. The reader, nominally a child,

pulled a tab at the bottom of the page to set the scene in motion. With the machinery

hidden in between two pages, this simple gesture seemingly lowered the lion’s mouth and

swished its tail. Then in a seamless second movement, the lion’s jaw dropped deeply into a

ferocious roar. The publisher believed the consumer would relish the vivification, the

illusion of danger both seen and heard. On the opposite page, the accompanying poem in

two sing-song verses thus reassured the reader of safety from the lion’s bite and bark:

The Lion’s glance is proud and fierce, His eyes the land do seem to pierce. And yet he will not seek your life, Or tear you in a bloody strife. The danger rather is that you (As little children often do) May tear the Lion in your play, By being rough to him one day.xxxii From text to image to sound, the lion demonstrates the complex intersensorality of such

early movable children’s books.

Meggendorfer’s masterpieces illuminate, or orate, to us today past cultural practices

of seeing as well as listening and touching, while also revealing a particular sonorous

environment around the turn of the twentieth century. While scholars have become adept at

visual analysis, the analysis of sound remains mostly unfamiliar. Historians have taken a

so-called “visual turn,” accepting visual materials and critiquing visual representations to

better understand the past.xxxiii Studies have convincingly demonstrated a late-nineteenth-

century explosion of the visual image in Germany and across Europe due, in part, to

advertising, media, and film, and, in part, to technological innovations like color printing

and photography.xxxiv Yet sensory historians, historical musicologists, film scholars, and

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others have noted that such attention to the visual has concealed the importance of sound to

the modern age.xxxv Modernity, we now understand, had an important aural dimension.

Fin-de-siècle material culture, like Lothar Meggendorfer’s works, often played to

multiple senses, to both seeing and hearing. Historian Mark M. Smith has advocated in his

lengthy historiographical review of sensory histories for more work regarding the

importance of intersensorality to modernity in the West as well as elsewhere.xxxvi Not

satisfied with interconnecting senses, film theoretician Michel Chion has posited a

transsensorial model, in which “there is no sensory given that is demarcated and isolated

from the outset,” so that the eye, for example, partially channels the visual and partially

channels the auditive.xxxvii Chion’s model best explains the roaring of the lion in the

example above. In previous work on Meggendorfers, I, too, have focused solely on the

visual, but the lion’s roar forced me to consider the relationship between aural as well as

visual imagery in these books.

That the lion does not actually roar is beside the point. The mind’s ear hears the

sound emitted from the animal as easily as the mind’s eye sees danger in the bones. The

books require a perception that is not merely seeing or hearing but seeing/hearing, what

Chion has termed audio-vision.xxxviii The clairaudient scene evoked a past soundscape, a

sonorous environment, as well as an imagined landscape that can both be recovered. The

soundscape and landscape worked together to produce the aural/visual experience.

Historians, like other serious readers, are used to silent sources, so paying attention to

“sounds of the past [that] have been (largely) lost” requires “acoustic imagination.”xxxix

Fortunately, humans have the capacity for a wide range of musical imagery, as explained

by neurologist Oliver Sacks, and for auditory recall.xl In fact, Meggendorfer’s books were

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premised on these abilities in his young readers. As the preeminent acoustic researcher R.

Murray Schafer has noted, the sounds carnivores produce, like the roar of the lion, “have

such striking qualities that they impress themselves instantaneously on the human

imagination. . . . One hearing and they will never be mistaken or forgotten in a lifetime.”xli

A nineteenth-century European child who has seen and heard a lion in a traveling

menagerie or zoological garden could easily invoke the experience again via

Meggendorfer’s book.

The books provide dramatic auditory materials once you begin “listening.” The

animal kingdom was one of his two most prevalent themes, and animals, including humans,

were impressively noisy creatures in Meggendorfer’s oeuvre. The other most prevalent

theme was music. Following the music and sound in the movable children’s books

provides critical insights not only into past listening and hearing, especially in terms of

human development that children were seen as bringing to light, but also into a historical

soundscape. Thus, the imagined noise of and around these early movable children’s books

can tell us much about how children were to be raised and were to grow in the nurseries

and concert halls of late-nineteenth-century Germany and, more broadly, the West. As

recent scholars have claimed, “sound mattered immensely to the articulation of meanings,

identities, pleasures, and communities in modern Germany.”xlii

Listening—consciously hearing—changed in the modern period. Explaining when

and why this change occurred has led to a rich scholarly debate, but the emergence of

professional musicians as well as the creation of sound recording technology figure as

prominent turning points. Roland Barthes and Peter Szendy have both posited a modern

listener who adopts the position of arranger or conductor.xliii For Barthes, Beethoven

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inspired the modern listener, who puts himself in the position of an operator vis-à-vis

Beethoven’s music; he thus celebrated the interpreter and bemoaned the current-day

technician, who no longer performed or, really, listened. Szendy’s modern listener,

however, was enthralled to the command “you must listen”—a command that has really

only been broken at the end of the twentieth century with the primacy of amateur arranging

and distracted listening. Both scholars suggest that the nineteenth century was a critical era

for a new kind of listening, one that unhinged listening to the work with the work to

listening.xliv Lothar Meggendorfer’s books were certainly a part of this revolution.

Moreover, they held in tension the two sides of this new listening regime: the impulse for

interpretation and the directive to listen.

The encouragement of modern listening in Meggendorfers may best be seen in the

German and English editions of Immer Lustig! or Always Funny!, which had slightly

different packagings of movable images.xlv Between the two picture books, Meggendorfer

illustrated and animated a conductor, a timpani player, a cellist, and a pianist. A full

quarter of the images were thus devoted to so-called classical music. Each image was a

lone male figure wearing a formal black suit. Elsewhere Meggendorfer depicted informal

rehearsals and popular music, but in these picture books, he represented indoor concerts

with loud, modern instruments. This was the sound and flavor of Munich-composer

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)—far from the noise of the beer halls. The reader would read

the two-stanza poem on the left about the scene, look at the image on the right of the

conductor or a musician, and pull the tab at the bottom of the illustrated page to set the

scene in motion. Of course, that may not have been the order employed by the reader at all.

Even as the materiality of this soundless production invited a certain reading—pages are

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read left-to-right after all—the child could enact its own musical mixing. These books, in

fact, represent an end-of-the-century celebration of creativity and imagination in

childhood.xlvi

This activity involved what Barthes called “muscular music” and “body

hearing.”xlvii The child engaged in physical play. Meggendorfers demanded an active

position to music; listening was thus channeled through the performing body, here the

child manipulating the pull-tabs. Ears hardly seemed necessary for sound production as,

for example, the reader moved the tab on the timpani player’s page that activated his arms

and hands holding the mallets to alternately strike the two drums. The scene invited its

own slow, steady rhythm, for the player’s arms bent and swung in such a high arc that it

would have been difficult—but certainly not impossible—to quickly strike the heads.

There was a clear visual representation of vigorous motion. Perhaps too vigorous, since the

mallets, which were quite thin strips of paper, were broken in the copy of Immer Lustig! I

examined in the Special Collections Department of the Marlene and Nathan Addlestone

Library at the College of Charleston. Meggendorfer also exaggerated the muscular nature

of music by designing such dramatic gestures.

Meggendorfer’s musicians encouraged small children to imagine themselves in

performative roles. Barthes asked rhetorically how many children dreamed of becoming a

conductor of an orchestra.xlviii Such a bourgeois dream could have been fed by the image of

the conductor, or bandmaster (der Kapellmeister), in Immer Lustig! The reader was led to

conduct, to wave both arms and single baton, via the pull-tab. The accompanying poem

noted that the master directed the sound to “swell to forte” and to “diminish to piano,”

effects that could also be achieved by graduated movements of the paper levers. The sound

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also helped to shape the imagined space of the concert hall where such dynamics could be

experienced by silent and rapt well-to-do audiences.xlix The final stanza also emphasized

the conductor’s responsibility, since “without the baton the confusion would not become

music.”l The child was thus invited to perform yet another musical task, and while

Meggendorfer and the publisher sought to prescribe the conducting (swelling and

diminishing), the medium motivated the child to take control—to become the actual

conductor. This movable image helped to mold a particular kind of listener from the youth

of Germany and England.

The child reader of these picture books practiced the listening demanded of the

professional concert of the late nineteenth century. She both faced the performer as the

listener and faced the listener as the performer. The arrangement emphasized the visual

aspect of the aural spectacle, yet again emphasizing Michel Chion’s audio-visual model of

perception. The formal dress of Meggendorfer’s conductor and musicians also invited class

distinctions, further defining the social space of the nursery and by extension concert hall.

This listening is not what R. Murray Schafer has described as immersion in the sound of,

say, a modern-day rock concert, where the presence of bass effects and loud speakers

ensures that the music reaches every audience member. The professional, classical concert

demanded concentration. Schafer called this “high frequency listening,” since distance,

direction, and dynamics mattered.li In contrast, a “lo-fi” environment is one in which high

ambient noise level obscures individual sounds, and thus perspective—location to the

performers—is lost. Low frequency listening also occurred in cars and homes with the use

of radios and stereos. In Immer Lustig! and Always Jolly!, Meggendorfer mimed

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concentrated listening in a “hi-fi” environment by representing the visual and social space

of the concert hall and isolating the discrete acoustical signatures of a few instruments.

In working out a sociology of music beginning in the 1940s, Theodor Adorno had

previously made distinctions in listening, and like Schafer, Adorno, too, passed subtle

pejorative judgment on the current state of listening. In Introduction to the Sociology of

Music, Adorno posited eight types of listeners, from the ideal “expert,” who was fully

conscious and missed nothing in the music, to the “indifferent, the unmusical or the anti-

musical.” The typology itself was based on the principle of “structural listening, that is, by

listening that concentrates on musical content via music’s structural unfolding in time.”lii

He seemed to suggest that such listeners were made—not born. Social privilege cultivated

such expertise, while the bourgeoisie practiced the listening of “cultural consumption” (the

third type) by “showing up” in the “symphony and opera crowd” and being “highly

antagonistic to new music.”liii In the nineteenth century, citizens in towns and cities across

the central German-speaking lands could easily find “well staged, professionally

performed, up-to-date works which were traditionally accepted as the finest musical and

social fruits that expert musicians could produce.” Meggendorfer’s hometown of Munich

regularly staged professional concerts “before any other European city except Paris.”

These concerts had first fed the social seasons of the nobility, but they came to be

supported and attended by the middle classes. Meggendorfer’s movable books assisted this

kind of wider cultural consumption.liv They did not train the bourgeois child’s ear so much

as they trained an elite attitude towards music.

Nevertheless, according to Adorno, the concert hall need not be a simple iteration

of privilege. The live, indoor performance was a shared experience of concentration and

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absorption: there was “utopian potential” in the “realized artwork” of the concert.lv So,

perhaps there was more than elitism to Meggendorfers. They educated the child about the

social, visual, and acoustical space of the concert hall, to be sure, but they also encouraged

the child to develop a musical consciousness.lvi And the structural listening they may have

demonstrated was merely prescriptive. The medium itself encouraged musical

experimentation or what Peter Szendy has called distracted listening. This kind of listening

is similar to reading: “reading a text, reading it in an ‘expert’ way, we rewrite it, we draw

quotations from it that are sometimes quite far apart from each other in the ‘body’ of the

text, we contrast and compare them, we make meanings and sometimes contradictions or

paradoxes emerge from them that the linear structure of the text did not immediately make

visible.”lvii Meggendorfer’s audience read/listened—not separate but, rather, augmented

activities—in a similar manner. There is evidence for such remixing in the surviving

books: children turned to favorite pages given the varied wear of particular pull-tabs and

broken levers. Structural listening broke down in the face of the books’ early soundboards.

Meggendorfer’s musicians did not just embody the formal event of the concert. The

accompanying stanzas, in particular, connected the public social activity to the private

domestic activity. As William Weber has noted in his study of nineteenth-century concert

life in London, Paris, and Vienna, musical activities in the middle-class home expanded

rapidly even as the contemporary formal concert emerged. Household music became

standard among the middle class, especially the upper middle class, simultaneously

responding to and fueling the growth of the publishing industry and instrument

manufacturing. The middle classes across western Europe consumed sheet music and

mass-produced instruments, and did so to a greater degree than public concerts.lviii

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Therefore, despite their formal attire, the professional musicians depicted in Always Jolly!

were also presented as teachers and pupils—as figures equally comfortable in the home

and on the stage. The representation of the cellist, simply called “The Musician,”

emphasized the performer’s youth, grace, and skill; the final lines concluded, “Our friend

still smiling seems to say / Come and I’ll teach you how to play.”lix Meggendorfer’s early

readers were prepped for future musical training. It also appeared quite natural for the child

to imagine himself as the pianist, who is specifically identified as a student of the piano.

Facing a challenging piece of sheet music and spreading his arms wide across the keys, the

piano player has his back fully towards the audience. The child reader could easily

approach the piano bench, assuming the muscular manipulation of the musician.

This practice session became the source of the joke: “’Tis hard to play like this, my

dears, / As by this pupil well appears, / His head and hands are so absurd / ’Tis good

indeed he can’t be heard.”lx The poem has dramatically shaped the imagined music. The

visual image did not suggest dissonance, and for a Meggendorfer figure, he was not really

absurd. His gestures were grand rather than sloppy. What a reader actually heard—whether

“good” or “bad”—is pure conjecture, for the acoustic event itself was indescribable. “The

Pianist” gives us insight into the acoustics of the late-nineteenth-century bourgeois home.

The piano was an important consumer product, one that defined a family’s prestige.lxi

Adorno himself, growing up in a well-to-do family, learned to play the piano at home with

his mother as his earliest instructor in the first decades of the twentieth century.lxii Most

girls and boys growing up in middle-class homes in Wilhelmine Germany could have

expected to receive piano lessons. But as historian Marion A. Kaplan has explained in her

study of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie in this period, German bourgeois women in

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particular were expected to obtain such a skill in order to “entertain their husbands and

children.” Before the introduction of gramophones in the wealthiest homes in the first

decades of the twentieth century, “families—or at least women—made their own music,”

and in “urban Jewish circles,” “‘piano lessons were taken for granted.’”lxiii In

Meggendorfer’s work, men were clearly depicted as the professionals, but muscular music

(performance) did not exclude a particular gender. Meggendorfer subtly poked fun of this

general bourgeois lifestyle by intimating the musical discord produced by struggles to

learn how to play musical instruments.

While Meggendorfer encouraged the kind of serious listening required in the

concert setting, especially with such formidable movable images as the timpanist and the

conductor, he also found serious listening amusing. As a practice of the bourgeoisie and

the aspiring bourgeoisie, it was lampooned in various images. This was not unusual, for

Meggendorfer exercised class commentary in other children’s books. English scholar

Michelle Ann Abate has analyzed Meggendorfer’s satirical treatment of the figure of the

“dandy” or “masher” (der Gigerl), a new bachelor identity associated with class posing

and effeminate masculinity around the turn of the twentieth century.lxiv Even as he catered

to the middle classes in western Europe, he found in consumerism, whether of certain

clothes or of musical efforts, a source of silliness.

Except it may not have been consumerism itself that was fodder for mockery. In a

self-portrait in the non-movable book Gute Bekannte, Meggendorfer depicted himself

standing at an easel, paints and brushes in hand, accepting payment for his work as an

artist and bookmaker.lxv This was a dignified treatment of his profession; he grasped the

nature of production and consumption regarding his own labor. His mockery, rather,

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stemmed from the emulation of bourgeois consumer practices by members of the lower

classes. This humor worked against the lower classes, but it could also work against the

middle classes. He was aware that the emulation sometimes exposed bourgeois practices

themselves as rather misguided. For example, his pull-tab image “Hausmusik” featured

two stout men performing a trombone-clarinet duet in a modest room. With mass-produced

instruments and sheet music, these men were enjoying the bourgeois pleasure of a musical

performance in a domestic setting. The men were red-faced from the exertion—muscular

music, indeed! The joke turned on the animation emphasized by the accompanying poem:

with the pull of the paper tab, the dog sitting between the two performers lifted its head to

howl, turning the duet into a trio, which, “thank God,” could not be heard.lxvi This was

exactly the kind of human-animal interaction Meggendorfer relished, and he echoed the

scene elsewhere with a man practicing a French horn in front of an open window,

prompting cats to howl outside and a dog to bark inside.lxvii The reality of music produced

in the home was far from the experience of music heard in the concert hall. Perhaps the

amateur should simply give it a rest, and at first glance, these representations of modest

men with questionable skills seemed unflattering. But Meggendorfer also showed that the

upper classes had no monopoly on music—in fact, humans had no monopoly on music.

Some of his most amusing figures that involved music played to and with

stereotypes of musicians. In a recent reproduction of Meggendorfer’s animations, Lustiges

Automaten-Theater (translated into English as Merry Company), two musicians were

featured.lxviii The violin-playing, toe-tapping “Der Tanzmeister” evoked the late eighteenth

century, wearing the wig and clothing of the era of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-

1791). A man to be admired, the dance master had prodigious “skill” and “grace,”

19  

according to the poem and the delicate dance move. Yet the pull-tab exaggerated his

prominent facial features: when set in motion, his eyebrows and eyelids lifted high and his

mouth opened in a grin. As with many of Meggendorfer’s figures, the influence of the

puppet theater was evident. Meggendorfer worked with puppets throughout his career, and

the gaping mouth, large eyes, and bulbous nose of puppet physiognomy appeared often to

comic effect in his picture books. “Die Sängerin,” too, in Lustiges Automaten-Theater was

meant to be laughed at. The wunderschöne woman was seated with guitar in hand, and

while her dress was colorful and neat, it was a bit odd with a large ruff. Here was a woman

acting beyond her means. Her true identity, however, was revealed when the tab was

pulled: she hideously transformed with eyes closed and mouth opened to reveal only two

teeth. She was a horrible caricature of the German bourgeois woman entertaining her

husband and children with song.

In various attempts to make music in Meggendorfer’s works, men, women, and

even animals figured as the butt of jokes. Race, as well as class, served as inspiration for

his humor. As dances and songs from North and South America became popular in larger

European cities around the turn of the century, Meggendorfer illustrated and animated

“Das Duett” in Schau mich an!lxix It featured a black man with an accordion and a black

woman with a guitar, sitting on a bench in front of a log home. These laborers, according

to the stanzas, were rejoicing after a day’s rest by singing to the accompaniment of their

instrumental playing. The structure of the house, the nature of their outfits and straw hats,

the presence of a palm tree and perhaps corn stalks, and the mixture of domestic animals (a

rooster, a dog, and a parakeet) suggested a noisy setting in the southern United States or

Caribbean. The North American environment was viewed as one filled with

20  

unconventional sounds; later, this, in part, was believed to have inspired jazz music, which

was also imported to Europe.lxx The figures themselves were racist caricatures with facial

features reduced to round, white eyes and bright, red lips. On the one hand, Meggendorfer

insisted on the ubiquity of music among humans. All humans had a compulsion to produce

it for pleasure around the turn of the twentieth century. On the other hand, he illustrated a

musical hierarchy with white, male European professionals positioned at the top, while

“Others” appeared as fodder for white children’s laughter.

Soundscape Lothar Meggendorfer made a good “earwitness,” as Schafer has termed past writers

attuned to their soundscape, which “consists of the events heard.”lxxi Perhaps this was a

result of his own musical background. As children’s literature scholar Hildegard Krahé has

detailed, Meggendorfer was the youngest of his father’s twenty-five children from two

marriages. When his father died in 1860, he had to switch from the academic-focused

Höher Schule to the trade-focused Gewerbeschule, where he was a poor student. At the age

of fifteen, he began his studies at the Kunstakademie, which he paid for by playing the

zither.lxxii Thus, his inauspicious beginning as a student was ultimately offset by both

artistic and musical talents. Through his teacher Wilhelm von Diez, Meggendorfer first

secured work at the satirical magazine Fliegende Blätter and also began to contribute to the

famous print series Münchener Bilderbogen. He returned repeatedly to the theme of music

in his “living picture books,” the first one of which he made as a Christmas present for his

oldest son, Adolph, and published in 1878 through Braun and Schneider in Munich.lxxiii

Music and other sounds were viewed as good subject matter for developing

children. Meggendorfers were well-suited to the latest understanding of early child

21  

development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They encouraged sensory

development, especially bourgeois notions of development. This was one topic addressed

by practitioners in the new scientific field of the science of childhood at the end of the

nineteenth century. Literary critic Sally Shuttleworth has traced the development of “baby

science” in late-nineteenth-century periodicals, arguing that specialist periodicals like Mind

as well as Charles Darwin’s 1877 article “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” based on

diary records that he and his wife, Emma, kept in the 1840s, in the fledgling journal helped

to place the study of babies on the “scientific agenda.” Wilhelm Preyer (1841-1897), who

corresponded with Darwin about his article and was himself an innovator in the field of

child psychology, produced in 1882 a definitive text, Die Seele des Kindes (The Mind of

the Child), while Professor of Physiology at the University of Jena. He used a case study

approach, meticulously observing and recording the development of his first-born son,

Axel Preyer, from birth to age three, when he developed speech.lxxiv Preyer began his study

detailing the five senses, for he believed that the development of the senses encouraged the

development of the will and the formation of ideas. Surprisingly, Preyer claimed that the

newborn human was deaf.lxxv

According to Preyer, this period of deafness was brief in normal child development.

From the moment of birth, the child’s senses advance, so that deafness disappeared within

hours or a few days, and the child’s sense of hearing grew ever more acute. The perception

of touch developed slowly, as did distinguishing smell from taste, which was evident after

eighteen months. Preyer marked milestones among the unfolding developmental phases.

For example, Axel’s first “unquestionable sound-imitation” occurred in the eleventh month

on precisely his 329th day, which indicated to his father that he was in the second phase of

22  

language acquisition.lxxvi Among the Preyers’ household goods, the piano figured

prominently in the child study. It was in Axel’s eighth week that he first heard the “music

of an instrument—the piano,” in which he took “delight.”lxxvii Preyer encouraged his son’s

interest in the object, instructing him in his fourteenth month to “play the piano” when he

beat his hands upon a table.lxxviii From his observations of his son with the piano, Preyer

summarized in regards to the sense of hearing that “it is three-quarters of a year, at least,

before a child knows the notes of the piano,” but it is after the end of the second year

before the child “can learn to name correctly c, d, e, f, g, a, b.”lxxix In Preyer’s baby

biography, the “normal” child developed in a world of sound and of musical instruments.

Milestones were measured, in part, by the material culture of the middle-class German

family.

Preyer and other pioneers in psychology established children’s natural affinity for

music by the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the laboratories in which this

claim was established were middle-class homes that clearly cultivated musical habits. In

such homes, nursery rhymes and folk songs became part of children’s repertoires, as seen

in other innovative child studies by William Stern (1871-1938). Stern, like Darwin and

Preyer, teamed with his wife, Clara Stern née Joseephy (1878-1945); he mined the

extensive diaries she kept of her three children’s earliest years to publish multiple studies

in the early 1900s. The Sterns were explicitly inspired by Preyer’s The Mind of the Child.

In the third edition of William Stern’s Psychologie der frühen Kindheit bis zum sechsten

Lebensjahr (Psychology of Early Childhood up to the Sixth Year of Age), he added a

chapter on the child and music. Long citations from Clara Stern’s recorded observations of

Hilde (b. 1900), Günther (b. 1902), and Eva (b. 1904) revealed that the Stern children were

23  

regularly sung to by both their mother and their father. William also performed piano

concerts for the children.lxxx According to the parents, Günther was the most “musical”: he

made up his own tune before he turned two, he was fond of whistling at the age of four and

a half, and he carefully picked out on the piano the song “From the wood, hear the

cuckoo’s call” at five and a half.lxxxi Stern maintained that children participated in

“absorbed listening,” even if briefly, and that “most little children at once translate the

music they hear into bodily movement.”lxxxii This was another kind of transsensory “body

hearing.”

But children, even bourgeois children, were exposed to music and sound beyond

the domestic sphere. In other words, the piano, albeit extremely important, was not the

only source of sound and music in their world. In fact, studies on sound have shown that

that world was alarmingly loud as a result of industrialization. Increasingly around the turn

of the twentieth century, people were experiencing sound differently and seeking to control

what came to be seen as noise, unwanted and loud sounds. R. Murray Schafer has

documented a dramatic increase in decibel levels since the nineteenth century to argue that

our world is saturated with noise pollution.lxxxiii Since Schafer articulated the problem, the

increased noise levels due to such technologies as engines and airplanes have been well

documented. Sound abatement legislation began to appear in the early twentieth century.

Historian John Goodyear examined critical responses to the increased noise levels that

coalesced in 1908 in Germany. In this year, the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor

Lessing (1872-1933) published his treatise on noise and founded a nationwide anti-noise

society (Antilärmverein), and Maximilian Negwer (1872-1943) began to mass-produce a

new range of earplugs called Ohropax, which became synonymous with the earplug in

24  

Germany.lxxxiv Meggendorfers seemed to capture the transition from a low-volume to a

high-volume environment: noise was not always negative in his works, but the city street

was also not yet deafening.

Consider the cacophony visually depicted in Meggendorfer’s 1893 panorama Vor

dem Thore (Before the Gate).lxxxv The eight-page scene unfolded like an accordion, a

design called a fanfold, or Leporellofaltung, that Meggendorfer also used to depict a circus

and Noah’s ark, among dozens of other books.lxxxvi The child could stand such a book up in

a variety of patterns and sit in front or within the scene in a physically immersive

reading/viewing experience. Vor dem Thore depicted pleasantly busy public spaces inside

a generic German town. In notes on its 1980 reproduction, Hildegard Krahé described such

picture books as both instructional instruments and pleasurable toys. From their inception

in the early-nineteenth-century Biedermeier period, she traced their expansion with the

development of color lithography in the early 1870s.lxxxvii Vor dem Thore had bright, but

flat, primary colors, adding vibrancy to the crowds. It depicted a bustling city, swarming

with children, women, and men as well as animals. Members of various socio-economic

classes attended to their affairs, like the humbly dressed women selling wares in the market,

the well-dressed men leisurely riding in horse-drawn carriages, the black servant following

in his mistress’s wake, and the working-class family transferring their belongings in a

tipping cart. Working-class children ran business errands, while middle-class children

chased hoops. A long line of men and women waited to board a horse tram. It is a

fascinating glimpse of a late-nineteenth-century city in Central Europe imagined as a

harmonious, living organism.

25  

It is also a visual depiction of a soundscape, a representation of an aural landscape.

As scholars of sound have demonstrated, sound is critical to defining such space. It can not

only carve out or differentiate territory, but it can also localize the visual. Both birds

singing and churchbells ringing effectively reveal how a particular locale can be

powerfully shaped by sound.lxxxviii Removed from the sounds of nature, Schafer would

describe this modern city as “lo-fi,” a sonic environment with such high ambient noise

levels that discrete sounds cannot be heard clearly. In a lo-fi space, sounds overlapped and

a listener lost perspective.lxxxix This was a city on the move with the wheels on pushcarts,

carriages, wagons, tramcars, and baby buggies clattering on cobblestones and crunching on

softer surfaces. Numerous horses provided much of the power for these vehicles, and there

were no less than twenty-eight included in Vor dem Thore. Their shod hooves would

resound rhythmically over street surfaces in what Schafer has described as “keynotes,” a

fundamental tone that need not be heard consciously.xc Oxen, too, pulled some work

wagons but were shown at rest in the book. Other animals, however, appeared to be noisy;

a flock of geese were clearly depicted in mid-squawk, and several dogs of various breeds

and breed-mixtures were represented in mid-bark. Everywhere people at work and at play

engaged in conversations: a dull roar of hundreds of voices.

Was this scene reminiscent of the nineteenth-century metropole’s “‘constant den of

construction, of the shrieking of metal sheets being cut and the endless thump of press

machinery, of ear-splitting blasts from huge steam whistles, sirens, and electric bells that

beckoned and dismissed shifts of first-generation urban laborers from their unending and

repetitive days’”?xci No. There was no factory smokestack in sight and no sign of heavy

construction. Here urban sounds were captured just prior to heavy and widespread

26  

industrialization. The noise may have been no less disorienting to the city dwellers, as

emphasized by the visual chaos; this was still a bustling urban setting that contemporaries

had to make sense of. The perspective was slightly above street level, and any church

steeple with bells—a distinctly produced soundscape described by French historian Alain

Corbin—were not in view.xcii Sound did not appear disconnected from its origins. Vor dem

Thore was a proto-industrial, pre-phonographic world. Many scholars have described how

the phonograph, and other instruments that recorded and reproduced sound, transformed

sound and listening. Sound became disembodied and moved freely through time and

space.xciii Meggendorfer’s metropolis may have been loud but was certainly not the

shocking noise of industrial and mechanically reproduced sounds.

The late-nineteenth-century city of Meggendorfer’s imagination appeared as an

orchestrated community. As we have seen, the orchestra was an expression of modern

sound that his audience understood in the fin de siècle. The significance of the concert hall

in metropolitan life was emphasized in the picture book by the announcement of a concert,

first depicted in the middle on the left-hand side of the cover. In its pride of place for

readers, the sign broadcasted a concert by “Pietro Armanini, Mandolinist.” The

announcement appeared again in the background on pages two, four, and five with five

gentlemen reading the poster’s fine print across these pages. So, while music itself did not

appear in the panorama, music was established as fundamental to the urban scene. Media

scholar Friedrich Kittler has argued in discussing such technological breakthroughs as the

gramophone, film, and typewriter that although media determines our situation, our

situation determines media.xciv Thus, the visual- and aural-rich environment of the city

27  

seems to have encouraged Lothar Meggendorfer’s interactive books deploying sensory

mixing and mobile technology.

That Meggendorfer was attuned to noise is supported by another panorama, which

has also been recently reproduced, simply called The City Park.xcv The city park was

viewed by nineteenth-century urban commentators as a natural corrective to a potentially

damaging urban environment. Reformers believed that growing children, in particular,

needed green spaces to thrive.xcvi Meggendorfer’s park was in part an extension of his city:

horse-drawn carriages moved along shaded paths, while numerous urban dwellers utilized

benches, rowboats, and lawns. As each page was framed with trees along the sides, a leafy

canopy up above, and various surfaces down below, the park appeared as a lush oasis. It

also appeared as a respite from the urban den; sounds of nature penetrated the city here.

Along the centerfold was a dramatic waterfall that pummeled rocks and then pooled on

either side of the page. On one side, a well-dressed man with two children, presumably a

father and his daughters, contemplated the waterfall and statue of a faun; on the other side,

a stag with his family, a female deer and fawn, looked to the waterfall and grazed at the

pool’s edge. It was a pastoral scene—a return to the sights and sounds of the natural world.

In contrast, the closing page featured the stone-arch exit of the city park where an organ

grinder plied his trade. The mechanized sound machine ushered park-goers back to the

urban cacophony.

Children, too, created noise, and adult efforts to control their noise exposed the

connection between noise and power. The economist Jacques Attali in Noise: The Political

Economy of Music has detailed ways that noise, particularly in the form of music, has held

tremendous power. He has argued that music participated in the creation and growth of

28  

capital and spectacle; it has heavily influenced production and consumption in our

world.xcvii Moreover, political control of listening has figured prominently in both

totalitarian and democratic societies in the form of censorship, and surveillance as well as

investment.xcviii Recognizing how power and control operate via sound better

contextualizes representations of noisy classrooms that Lothar Meggendorfer made. In one

book of slat transformations, he portrayed “The Obedient Class.”xcix The picture

transformed from an orderly classroom with the teacher squarely facing and scowling at

the schoolboys to a disorderly classroom with pupils engaged in various rowdy antics

when the teacher turned his back to face the chalkboard at the front of the room. The

“classroom peace,” as the accompanying poem noted, “shatters” with the pull-tab. The

publisher’s sympathy was with the students who had to “stay still / For hours on end with

book and pen.” It was the authority of the teacher that alone instilled silence. The teacher

demanded respect in this form and policed the students’ manners, as quiet became a

marker of bourgeois sensibility in the nineteenth century.c Those with power have been

able to shape noise—to advance sound or to create silence.

Coda I have attempted to read—or, rather, re-mix—Lothar Meggendorfer’s moving

picture books as transsensory objects. In so doing, their audio-visual nature has come to

the foreground. The picture books simultaneously channeled multiple sensory perceptions.

Even as the eyes absorbed the lithographs and the hands manipulated the mechanisms, the

ears perceived the sounds. Moreover, this clairaudience was purposeful; Meggendorfer’s

punch lines often involved the auditory—recall the howling dog joining the laborious duet

and the dissonant music of the well-attired piano player. Meggendorfers did not, however,

29  

simply entertain; they also instructed. They enacted the kind of attentive listening expected

of good bourgeois children, and they engaged what was perceived as children’s natural

affinity for music. Several images coached children to learn musical instruments, to

become entertainers themselves. There seem to have been competing elitist and

emancipatory impulses in Lothar Meggendorfer’s works.

Meggendorfers also reflected the latest printing and optical technologies of the late

nineteenth century. As such, they were expressions of a modernizing Europe. This was no

less true in their approach to sound; they captured exactly a world in transition.

Meggendorfer’s soundscapes were filled with modern, mass-produced instruments and the

noises of industrious people and animals. Yet loud industrial machines and mechanically

reproduced sounds did not appear. Meggendorfers depicted a loud, but not polluted,

environment. Meggendorfer’s books also anticipated the power of sound effects, of

merging a sound and an image to create a new experience. He demonstrated that modernity

was as much of an oracle—an aural extravaganza—as a spectacle. His moving picture

books were expressive of both. They invited a new kind of reading, an imaginative process

of perceiving the inaudible in animated paper.

                                                                                                                iThe Publishing Archive of Lothar Meggendorfer, with an appreciation by Maurice

Sendak (New York: Justin G. Schilder, 1975), n.p.

iiKeith Jacobs, “Robert Sabuda: An Investigation into the World of Movable Books,”

Flaunt, http://flaunt.com/fob/108/robert-sabuda (accessed June 29, 2012).

iiiBoth the identification and naming of such materials as movable books are difficult.

“Pop-up” or “three-dimensional” does not often appear in the title of such works, while

they have been variously labeled pop-up books, toy books, surprise books, puppet books,

30  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               movable books, novelty books, eccentric books, etc. Meggendorfer sometimes included the

term Ziehbilderbuch for his pullout picture books, and his name itself quickly became

synonymous with illustrations that the reader could move. The term “movable books” is

now consistently used across a spectrum of print materials to indicate books with text or

illustrations that the reader can move via revolving disks, foldouts, lift-up flaps, pull tabs,

pop-ups, and wheels, and sometimes cut-out figures and models. Ann R. Montanaro,

“Introduction,” in Pop-Up and Movable Books: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow,

1993); Lea M. McGee and Rosalind Charlesworth, “Books with Movables: More than Just

Novelties,” The Reading Teacher 37, no. 9 (1984): 853-59; and Gay Walker, “Eccentric

Books,” exhibition Yale University Library, January-March 1988.

ivHelmut Schwarz, “‘Designed in England, Made in Bavaria’: Ernest Nister—An Almost

Forgotten Nürnberg Publisher,” foreword to Peeps into Nisterland: A Guide to the

Children’s Books of Ernest Nister, by Julia and Frederick Hunt (Chester, UK: Casmelda

Publishing, 2005), 2.

vMartin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French

Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 11.

viEric Faden has fruitfully explored the connection in visual narratives between

movables and cinema in “Movables, Movies, Mobility: Nineteenth-Century Looking and

Reading,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2007): 71-89.

viiThe Publishing Archive, n.p.; Eric Quayle, Early Children’s Books: A Collector’s

Guide (London: David & Charles, 1983); Ann Bahar, “Lothar Meggendorfer and the

Movable Toy Book,” Hobbies (December 1983), 57-59; Montanaro, Pop-Up and Movable

Books; Ann Montanaro, “A Concise History of Pop-Up and Moveable Books,” from the

31  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Rutgers University Libraries, The Pop-Up World of Anne Montanaro,

http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/libs/scua/montanar/p-intro.htm (accessed June 5, 2012).

viiiMontanaro, “A Concise History”; Bahar, “Lothar Meggendorfer,” 57; and Edwina

Evers, “A Historical Survey of Movable Books,” AB Bookman’s Weekly, August 19-26,

1985, 1204-1210.

ixSee, for example, the advertisement inside the back cover of Dean’s New Book of

Dissolving Pictures (London: Dean & Son, c. 1862), Rare Book & Special Collections

Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter LOC).

xLittle Red Riding Hood (London: Dean & Son, c. 1855), LOC. I wish to thank Jackie

Colburn from bringing this wonderful book to my attention.

xiEvers, “A Historical Survey,” 1206.

xiiSchwarz, “‘Designed in England,’” 2.

xiiiQuayle, Early Children’s Books, 222-223.

xivMontanaro, “A Concise History”; Montanaro, “Introduction,” xvi-xvii; and Evers, “A

Historical Survey,” 1206-1207.

xvBahar, “Lothar Meggendorfer,” 58.

xviThe Publishing Archive, n.p.

xviiIn 1978, Hildegard Krahé wrote that Lothar Meggendorfer’s name had “almost fell

into oblivion,” and she contributed to his name’s revival by publishing articles in journals

and writing commentaries in reproductions of his works: Hildegard Krahé,

“Meggendorfer-Bibliographie,” Marginalien. Zeitschrift für Buchkunst und Bibliophilie 70,

no. 2 (1978): 1.

32  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                xviiiMichelle Ann Abate, “When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style,

Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Scenes in the Life

of a Masher,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2012): 44.

xixThe Genius of Lothar Meggendorfer, preface by Maurice Sendak, introduction by

Waldo H. Hunt (New York: Intervisual Communications, 1985), n.p.; The Publishing

Archive, n.p.

xxJustin G. Schiller, “Introduction,” in The Publishing Archive, n.p.; Abate, “When

Clothes,” 43-44; Kristin Knipschild, “Moveable Magic,” Friends of the Library Magazine

(University of Wisconsin-Madison) 46 (Spring 2006): 8.

xxiBahar, “Lothar Meggendorfer,” 57; Stephen J. Gertz, “Waldo Hunt and Pop-Up

Books: A Brief Overview,” November 30, 2009, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Book Patrol,

http://blog.seattlepi.com/bookpatrol/2009/11/30/waldo-hunt-and-pop-up-books-a-brief-

overview/ (accessed June 30, 2012).

xxiiAbate, “When Clothes,” 57.

xxiiiEvers, “A Historical Survey,” 1202; Werner Rebsamen, “The Manufacture of Pop-

Up Books,” The New Library Scene 5, no. 4 (1986): 15-17.

xxivMontanaro, “A Concise History,” n.p.

xxvQuayle, Early Children’s Books, 219-223; Genius, n.p.

xxviGenius, n.p. For more information on Schreiber’s press and its production, see

Kristen Fast and Margret Burscheidt, “Jakob Ferdinand Schreiber und sein Verlag,” in

Arbeitskreis Bild Druck Papier, vol. 7, Tagungsband Esslingen (Münster: Waxmann,

2004), 9-20.

33  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Julia and Frederick Hunt have noted that workers in Nister’s Nuremberg publishing

house were “very well treated” with women earning “eight to twelve shillings a week” and

men earning “a great deal more”; Peeps into Nisterland, 13.

xxviiBahar, “Lothar Meggendorfer,” 59.

xxviiiThe Publishing Archive, n.p.

xxixSee advertisements at the back of the original books in Cotsen Children’s Library,

Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ (hereafter Cotsen).

xxxLothar Meggendorfer Drehbilder-ABC. Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch, text von

Ferdinand Feldigl (Esslingen: J. F. Schreiber, c. 1898), and ABC, text by Ferdinand Feldigl

(Esslingen: J. F. Schreiber, c. 1914), Cotsen.

xxxiKnipschild, “Moveable Magic,” 8.

xxxiiLothar Meggendorfer, Always Jolly! A Moveable Toybook (London: H. Grevell &

Co., 1891), n.p., Department of Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers

Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL (hereafter Smathers).

xxxiiiJay, Downcast Eyes; Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention,

Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Emily Thompson, The

Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America,

1900-1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past:

Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), esp. intro.

xxxivVolker M. Langbehn, “Picturing Race: Visuality and German Colonialism,” in

German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, 1-33 (New York: Routledge,

2010).

34  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                xxxvNora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick, “Introduction: Sound Matters,” in Sound Matters:

Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004),

11.

xxxviSmith, Sensing the Past, 16-17.

xxxviiMichel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 136-137.

xxxviiiChion, Audio-Vision, xxi, xxv.

xxxixFlorence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill, “Tuning in the Aural Ether: An

Introduction to the Study of German Sounds,” in Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century:

An Introduction, 1-16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11.

xlOliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2007), esp. chap. 4. Advertising for the German earplugs Ohropax was even premised on

the power of auditory recall: John Goodyear, “Escaping the Urban Din: A Comparative

Study of Theodor Lessing’s Antilärmverein (1908) and Maximilian Negwer’s Ohropax

(1908),” in Feiereisen and Hill, eds., Germany, 19-34.

xliR. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977), 38.

xliiAlter and Koepnick, eds., Sound Matters, 9.

xliiiRoland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 149-

154 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans.

Charlotte Mandell (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008).

xlivSzendy, Listen, 128.

xlvThe copy of Immer Lustig! in the Special Collections Department of the Marlene and

Nathan Addlestone Library is signed “Theodora Maria Eldredge, 1886, 199 Beacon St.,

35  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Boston” and stamped “Hamburg, Fritz-S[unclear], Book-Store,” which points to the

circulation of German picture-books in the United States: Lothar Meggendorfer, Immer

Lustig! Ein Ziehbilderbuch, 3rd ed. (München: Braun & Schneider, 1886), Special

Collections Department, Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library, College of Charleston,

Charleston, SC (hereafter Addlestone). Meggendorfer, Always Jolly!, Smathers.

xlviSally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science,

and Medicine, 1840-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 75.

xlviiBarthes, “Musica Practica,” 149-150.

xlviiiBarthes, “Musica Practica,” 152.

xlixSchafer, Tuning, 117.

lMeggendorfer, Immer Lustig!, n.p.

liSchafer, Tuning, 43, 117-118.

liiTheodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, tran. Susan H. Gillespie

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 228-229.

liiiAdorno, Essays on Music, 229.

livHenry Raynor, A Social History of Music: From the Middle Ages to Beethoven (1972;

repr., New York: Taplinger, 1978), 317-330.

lvAdorno, Essays on Music, 224.

lviAdorno also critiqued musical pedagogy for children, including “a marked tendency to

organize chronology against a musical telos of simple (early music) to complex (post-

Bach),” and advocated a musical education approach that began with the student’s

“‘normal’ musical language”: Adorno, Essays on Music, 223.

lviiSzendy, Listen, 104.

36  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                lviiiWilliam Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in

London, Paris and Vienna (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975), 6.

lixMeggendorfer, Always Jolly!, n. p.

lxMeggendorfer, Always Jolly!, n. p.

lxiAdorno, Essays on Music, 232.

lxiiAdorno, Essays on Music, xiii-xv, 1-5.

lxiiiMarion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and

Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 121.

lxivAbate, “When Clothes,” 43-65.

lxvLothar Meggendorfer, Gute Bekannte (Stuttgart: W. Nitzschke, c. 1880), n.p., Cotsen.

lxviLothar Meggendorfer, Schau mich an! (Eßlingen: J. F. Schreiber, c. 1888), n.p.,

Cotsen.

lxviiGenius, n.p.

lxviiiLothar Meggendorfer, Lustiges Automaten-Theater. Ein Ziehbilderbuch (Esslingen: J.

F. Schreiber, 1890; repr., Wien: Österreichischer Budensverlag Wien, 1993), Addlestone.

lxixChristopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 564-565; Friedrich A. Kittler,

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael

Wutz (1986; repr., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 37.

lxxThompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 130-131.

lxxiSchafer, Tuning, 8-10.

lxxiiKrahé, “Meggendorfer-Bibliographie,” 2.

lxxiiiKrahé, “Meggendorfer-Bibliographie,” 2-3.

37  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                lxxivSally Shuttleworth, “Tickling Babies: Gender, Authority, and ‘Baby Science,’” in

Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, ed.

Geoffrey Cantor et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 204-205; Amanda

Brian, “Kinderland in the Fatherland: Growing Children in Imperial Berlin” (doctoral

dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2009), chap. 2; and Shuttleworth,

The Mind of the Child, 228-229.

lxxvW[illiam] Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes. Beobachtungen über die geistige

Entwickelung des Menschen in den ersten Lebensjahren (Leipzig: Th. Grieben’s Verlag,

1882). Unless otherwise noted, translations are from William Preyer, The Mind of the

Child, 2 vols., trans. H. W. Brown (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1888-1889;

repr., New York: Arno Press, 1973). Preyer, The Mind, 1:1-2, 72. Preyer was not alone in

assessing newborns’ hearing as deficient; he followed other practitioners like the German

experimenter Adolf Kussmaul (1822-1902), who had previously reached such a conclusion.

Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, 225.

lxxviPreyer, The Mind, 2:109.

lxxviiPreyer, The Mind, 1:84.

lxxviiiPreyer, The Mind, 2:120.

lxxixPreyer, The Mind, 1:182.

lxxxWilliam Stern, Psychology of Early Childhood up to the Sixth Year of Age, 3rd ed.,

trans. Anna Barwell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1924; repr., New York: Arno

Press, 1975).

lxxxiStern, Psychology, 342-343.

lxxxiiStern, Psychology, 343-344.

38  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                lxxxiiiSchafer, Tuning, intro.

lxxxivGoodyear, “Escaping the Urban Din.”

lxxxvLothar Meggendorfer, Vor dem Thore. Ein Bilderbuch (Esslingen: J. F. Schreiber,

1893; repr., 1980), Cotsen.

lxxxviLothar Meggendorfer, Im Circus. Ein Bilderbuch, 3rd ed. (Munich: Braun &

Schneider, c. 1885), Cotsen; Arche Noah. Ein Bilderbuch (Esslingen: J. F. Schreiber, 1903),

Cotsen.

lxxxviiMeggendorfer, Vor dem Thore, back cover.

lxxxviiiFilmmakers have come to understand and utilize the spatial nature of sound; see

Chion, Audio-Vision, esp. chap. 4.

lxxxixSchafer, Tuning, 42-44.

xcSchafer, Tuning, 8-11.

xciMel Gordon, “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-

1930),” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn

and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 197, as cited in Alter and

Koepnick, eds., Sound Matters, 5-6.

xciiAlain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French

Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

xciiiLeppert, “Commentary,” in Adorno, Essays on Music, 233; Chion, Audio-Vision, 71-

73; Schafer, Tuning, 89; Eric Ames, “The Sound of Evolution,” Modernism/Modernity 10,

no. 2 (2003): 297-325; and Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and

intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (1986; repr. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1999).

39  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                xcivKittler, Gramophone, xxxv.

xcvLothar Meggendorfer, The City Park: A Reproduction of an Antique Stand-up Book

(Munich: Brown and Schneider, 1887; repr., New York: Viking Press, 1981), Addlestone.

xcviMarta Gutman and Ning de Connick-Smith, “Introduction: Good to Think With—

History, Space, and Modern Childhood,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space,

and the Material Culture of Children (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,

2008). There are extensive literatures on the urban planning and ecology, and even the city

park; see Michael Bennett and David W. Teague, eds., The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism

and Urban Environments (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1999).

xcviiJacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 4-6.

xcviiiAttali, Noise, 7-9.

xcixLothar Meggendorfer, Trick or Treat: A Reproduction of an Antique Moving Picture

Book Full of Surprises (Esslingen: J. F. Schreiber, 1899; repr., London & Tonbridge:

Ernest Benn, 1981), Addlestone.

cSmith, Sensing the Past, 48-50.