WriteAntiques

The introduction of the lithographic process and other improved printing techniques meant that by the 1850s, beautifully illustrated multi-coloured Christmas cards were winging their way around the country by the sackful. Why not collect them?

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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.

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