75. Children's book

In 1944 the Koninklijke Bibliotheek bought a large collection of early children's books from the Hague Public Library. Thus dialogues between father and son, historical tales with a pedagogical and moralistic undertone, religious narratives, and natural history books for children - many of them illustrated with lithographs in black and white as well as in colour - entered the collection. Among them were a number of picture books, including this edition of Little Red Riding Hood, a fairy tale from the collection of The Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault (1628-1703), which appeared as Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. This work was a great success and the stories were adapted and retold over and over again, resulting in considerable changes to the original stories. Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, had a much more gruesome ending in Perrault than in the present version. Not until Grimm did the hunter make his appearance, just happening to pass by and thus able to save the disobedient girl from the wolf's voracious appetite, which somewhat alleviated the punishment for straying from the right path.

The book was published by Gebr. Belinfante, a publishing house established by the brothers Mozes and Jacob Belinfante in 1804. Originally their list only comprised publications in the field of law and politics, but when the reading public increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, the company branched out into cheap popular reading matter and children's books.

In order to make the booklet attractive to children the text of this edition has been kept very brief, and attention is focused on the visual representation. Each illustration consists of three cut-out lithographs, coloured by hand and interconnected by a piece of tape which causes them to pop up in a row if it is pulled. The resulting perspective of the illustration promotes a greater feeling of involvement in the beholder. Movable images in themselves were not new. Some manuscripts and incunabula already used illustrations with movable parts, for instance to explain the course of the heavenly bodies. The eighteenth century already had movable books for children in the form of harlequinades, but not until the second half of the nineteenth century did movable children's book actually boom. Unfortunately they were very vulnerable, so unimpaired copies of early picture books with this kind of movable illustrations are now relatively rare.

Literature

• P. Haining. Movable books. London 1979 
• L. Mourey. Introduction aux contes de Grimm et de Perrault. Paris 1978 
• A.C. Kruseman. Bouwstoffen voor een geschiedenis van den Nederlandschen boekhandel gedurende de halve eeuw 1830-1880. 2 dln. Amsterdam, 1886-1887.