One Head as Good as Eight

London: Dean & Son, Printers and Publishers, 65, Ludgate Hall, E. C., [1869]. 8vo (9.75” x 6.75”), pebbled red cloth with pictorial green paper over front board and purple paper with ad over rear board. Publisher’s title replacement on front cover pasted over an earlier title, likely “The Little Girl.” Ad for Chapman & Co’s “Patent Entire Wheat Flour” on back cover. 8 ff. with chromolithographic illus. and text on one side only, terminal leaf affixed to inside of back cover. CONDITION: Good, front cover paper chipped along spine, extremities worn, lower cover soiled; light wear to pages, “flexible face” toned and hardened but remarkably well preserved.

A rare and remarkably well-preserved “flexible-face” book from London’s pioneering and prolific producer of toy and movable books for children.

One Head as Good as Eight, or, as it was first known, simply The Little Girl, was the fifth in Dean & Son’s “Flexible-Faced Story Book” series. These books were constructed around a moldable gutta-percha head, which, affixed to the lower cover, appeared through a cutout on each of the eight pages. Here, “Little Jane,” a well-behaved charity-school orphan, supports herself as a maid, a shop girl, a flower girl, a milliner’s apprentice, and a dancer, before becoming engaged to be “A happy little wife!” An ad in the 3 November 1869 issue of The Bookseller lists the volume as The Flexible-Faced Little Girl; or, One Head as Good as Eight and notes that, “the Face being elastic, may be made to appear jolly or moody, long or short, at pleasure, and to adapt itself in illustration to the reading.” Illustrations are signed with either or both the names of “B[enjamin]. Clayton” and “F. E. Jones.” The basic cut-out design of the “flexible face” series appeared among the earliest of Dean’s toy books in the “Dame Wonder’s Transformations” books of the 1840s, but the gutta-percha head was evidently a new addition in the mid to late 1860s.

Dean & Sons was a leading publisher of mechanical and toy books and dominated the London movable book market from the 1840s through the 1870s. The firm was founded by Thomas Dean sometime before 1800 and was the first to make extensive use of lithography. The company operated under “Dean & Bailey” and then “Dean & Mundy” before, in 1848, becoming “Dean & Son” when son George joined the firm. In the 1860s they advertised themselves as being the “originator of childrens’ movable books” (Montanaro, p. xv). Whether or not this was strictly true, they were certainly “the first publisher to produce movable books on a large scale” (“A Tour”).

OCLC records just four copies, only one of which is in the United States, at the University of Washington.

REFERENCES: “A Tour Through Their History: Dean and Son” at University of North Texas Library Exhibits online; Haining, Peter. Movable Books: An Illustrated History (New English Library Limited, 1979), pp. 20–21; Montanaro, Ann R. Pop-Up and Movable Books: A Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 1993).