A Tale of an Old Sugar Tub. With Surprise Model Pictures.
(Dean’s Surprise Model Series, No. 2)
London: Dean & Son, 160A Fleet Street, [ca. 1892].
Oblong 4to (31 cm). Quarter blue cloth with illustrated paper-covered boards. [10] pp., including two single-page pop-ups and one central double-page pop-up, all in colour.
An exceptionally rare and fragile example from Dean’s celebrated Surprise Model series, employing an unusual and highly ambitious pop-up mechanism operated by fine cotton threads. When opened, the strings laterally pull the illustrations into rounded, dimensional form, creating a striking illusion of solidity and movement; when closed, the pages return to a flat state.
The story depicts two boys climbing into a sugar tub (barrel) and becoming trapped by old tar, illustrated with dramatic model scenes. This complex thread-based construction is unique to this four-book series and represents one of the most technically daring experiments in nineteenth-century movable books.
Each movable page bears printed instructions at the head—“BEFORE OPENING EACH PAGE PLACE THUMBS WHERE MARKED, HOLD FIRMLY AND OPEN WIDE”—with small thumb illustrations indicating correct handling, a clear acknowledgement by the publisher of the extreme delicacy of the mechanism.
Iona and Peter Opie famously described the Surprise Model books as the “most ambitious and fragile of nineteenth-century pop-up books,” noting that “the effect of solidity was attempted by the use of laterally attached cotton threads which pulled in the sides of the chief feature to make it rounded.”
Condition:
Very good. A notably well-preserved copy. All movables present and complete with original threads intact, with the sole exception of the tip of a dog’s tail missing from one movable. Binding firm and original, with no loose pages. Partial opening suggests some movables are slow to deploy; the threads appear intact, but the movables have not been fully opened flat, so as to avoid risking damage to the original mechanism.
Rare. Copies with intact threads are extremely uncommon.
Collector’s Note: Dean’s Surprise Model Books
Dean & Son produced four titles in this celebrated series (1892), followed by a later related volume:
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Surprise Model Picture Book (Series No. 1), 1892
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A Tale of an Old Sugar Tub (Series No. 2), 1892
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Seaside Fun with Surprise Model Pictures (Series No. 3), 1892
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A Visit to the Country (Series No. 4), 1892
Related: The Surprise Animal Picture Book, 1896 (advertised as employing an “entirely new mechanism”).
International editions:
We have also identified a Scandinavian edition of this title, published in Malmö under the title Historien om en Gammal Sockertunna (“The Story of an Old Sugar Tub”), confirming that Dean & Son’s Surprise Model books were distributed internationally. An example of the Swedish edition has appeared at auction (Auctionet), illustrating the same distinctive barrel scene and thread-operated pop-up construction.
Image reproduced from a Swedish-language edition offered at auction by Auctionet; shown for reference only and not included in this sale:
