Jacqueline Reid-Walsh with Imaan Visram
This long blog concerns my process of writing a label for a Penn State rare books display starting in December. The challenge is to write about an item that you consider one of your “favorite things” for an exhibit called “playing favorites” We are to follow the rules in “a guide to exhibition Label Writing” and limit our text to 100-150 words per item. We have two prompts “what am i looking at” and “why should I look at it” while keeping in mind that a label “is an invitation to look, a brief encounter, and a bridge to a more meaningful encounter.”
I have chosen to compare two interactive books published in the later 1920’s and early 1930’s in Germany and the US: Das Zauberboot 1929; The Magic Boat, (translated 1935) by Tom Seidman-Freud and Magic Movie Book … (1943) by Tony Sarg, respectively. Each maker was and is a noted moveable book designer for children. Because I discuss two items, I am allowed a few more words but it is a challenge to be explanatory and descriptive and make a persuasive argument to a potential museum viewer!
What connects these books is their ingenious design that invites children to become interactors, instead of simply viewers or players of a book object (Reid-Walsh 2018). Notably, the instructions on how to use the books challenge the child to assume an active role (note 1). With these two books, children are invited to play with perception by using prosthetic devices included with the books. Seidmann-Freud has a simple request to take a small piece of red transparent film from the back of the book and place it over the red and blue colored pictures. Sarg has a more complex task: first to take the red and blue bi-colored “magic glasses” from the front of the book. Then look at the red and blue drawings displayed as if early cinema by moving a projecting volvelle or disc at the side edge of the page. Both sets of illustrations use the same colors and resemble drawn pictures as opposed to polished artworks. The style of the images invites an informal active approach. The implied task is to make sense of the blue and red line drawings. I consider both sets visual media puzzles. Seidmann -Freud specifically calls for “clever children” to go on to “make their own pictures.” Tony Sarg does not describe his child viewers but challenges them to put on the “magic glasses” to discover how they perceive (see blog posts “Pop-Out” and “Magic Pictures“). In both cases the roles of the children are essential for the books’ effects and meanings. I would say they are visual experiments to be solved; I am intrigued by the invitations of these two books to play with perception with red and blue. Underneath is a step-by-step “revealing” of Seidmann-Freud’s book.
I have taken the challenge twice. I used the red paper that effectively transforms the child image into an invisible child. However, I wonder about the blue. I bought some blue transparent paper, but it does not work the same way since the images show through the film.
My ongoing questions are how and why:
How does the age of the material and the ink effect the visual transformations? ie the paper, the film, the tones of the inks on paper.
How does working with the original books versus photocopies effect the transformation?
Is there a difference in perception between the red film on red illustration and the blue film on blue illustration? Does this difference account for the illusion working in the first instance and not working in the second?
Is there a difference in perception between laying colored film directly on top of the paper and looking through the plastic glasses from a distance?
Now what remains is the task of writing 150 coherent words with a catchy title for the labels for these two books that are going on display in a very short time. Exciting, challenging, and daunting!
Note 1: I compare these instructions to early books with interlocutor gestures of fingers directing how to read a book as discussed in The Education of Things 2024, by Elizabeth Hoiem.
Reid-Walsh, J. Interactive Books (2018).