Dean & Son – Flexible-Faced Story Books – The Merry Old Dame Who Sings Fiddle-De-Dee (Cut Out Head Book, ca. 1864)

The Merry Old Dame Who Sings Fiddle-de-Dee

London: Dean & Son, Ludgate Hill, 1864.

Quarto (25 × 17 cm). [2] ad pages including front pastedown, plus 8 full-page hand-colored woodcuts. Sixteen pages total. Original pictorial boards, red cloth spine, and gutta-percha sculpted head embedded from the rear cover through to the front. The carved face also penetrates through the ad page and appears on every scene, with the illustrated faces cut away to reveal the sculpted 3D expression beneath. Beneath each illustration is a rhyming verse narrating the dame’s antics. Bound with color-illustrated paper-covered boards.

Believed to be the first and only edition, issued in 1864 as the inaugural title in Dean & Son’s Flexible-Faced Story Books series. No later reprints or variants have been recorded in institutional collections or bibliographies.

Condition: Very good. Complete. Gutta-percha head worn with age. Pages are detached but present. Binding shows expected wear with some edge fraying. The paper cut-out story pages are well-preserved except for the final leaf, which exhibits fragile edges and a short closed tear on the first page. See photos for details.

Collector’s Corner:

This book is from Dean & Son’s innovative Flexible-Faced Story Books series. Each book in the series featured 16 pages and 8 oil-colored illustrations, paired with a sculpted flexible head originally designed to animate various expressions when matched to the scenes. The faces, made of gutta-percha, have since hardened over time but remain a marvel of early book engineering.

Titles in the Flexible-Faced Story Books Series:

1. The Merry Old Dame, Who Sings Fiddle-de-Dee – 1864

2. The Hearty Old Boy, Who Was Always the Same – 1864

3. The Jolly Old Man, Who Sings Down Derry Down – 1865

4. The Little Girl, or One Head as Good as Eight – 1867

5. Lady John Hodge, or The Unchangeable Dame – 1867

   An advertisement for Dean & Son’s Flexible-Faced Story Books was found in Sunday Employment: Short Tales for Sunday Reading by Frances Upcher Cousens (1870, pp. 137–138). The ad promotes the publisher’s “New Series of Flexible-Faced Story Books,” described as containing "a fund of amusement to both old and young." The text explains that “the head in the Picture can be made to assume various shapes, causing much merriment,” with a price of two shillings for “coloured pictures, half-bound, board, illuminated cover.”

   The same ad offers a specific description of The Flexible-Faced Merry Old Dame who sings ‘Fiddle-de-dee’, noting that her “whimsicalities” are humorously told and that her “squeezable elastic face… can be made to open his mouth, shut his eyes, and lengthen his face, at pleasure.” It compares her antics to those of her husband, The Jolly Old Man, whose face also “can be made long and short, or merry or sad, at will.”

The series was later echoed in the “Funny Face Series” issued in 1903, including titles such as:
( As seen in the Catalogue of Current Literature. Vol. 3, 1906, p. 12. accessed via google books)

• There Was a Little Man and He Had a Little Gun – Funny Face Series #1 (1903)

• Old Mother Hubbard – Funny Face Series #2 (1903)

These later books were illustrated by Japanese artist Yoshio Markino and reimagined the mechanical head concept with updated materials and themes.