[THE METAMORPHIC PICTURE BOOK] Libro magico trovato dagli spiriti folletti [Magic book found by the elf spirits].
Turin and Milano: Carlo Manfredi and Gio. Gnocchi, [circa 1870]. Octavo (18 × 13 cm). Original boards with a color lithograph in blue, orange, and brown on both covers. [100] pp. with numerous wood engravings, some of them stencil-colored. Spine renewed; binding with barely noticeable minor restorations and likely slightly resized; light signs of use internally; else very good. Item #55954
A rare late nineteenth-century "blow book", a style of magic trick dating back to the sixteenth century. With a blow book, a magician presents a book and flips through it. Due to particular tabbing of the pages, when the book is flipped through for an audience, it will display only a single type of image. The magician will then have an audience member "blow" on the book and will flip through it again, secretly using a different set of tabbed pages, revealing that the images are now colored or completely different than what was seen before, or that the pages are even blank.
The Blow Book is regarded as the “oldest manufactured conjuring prop.” Girolamo Cardano described the trick as early as 1550, while "Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft" (1584) provides a detailed account of the technique. By the beginning of the seventeenth century at the latest, this type of magical book was known as a Blow Book, since the effect was no longer attributed to magic spells but to the magician’s blowing. This description of blowing is first attested in Hocus Pocus Junior, the "Anatomie of Legerdemain or, The Art of Juggling," published in 1634. Another name for this prepared picture book is flick book. This trick appears to have enjoyed such popularity in Europe during the Thirty Years’ War that it is also found in Grimmelshausen’s Baroque novel "Der seltzame Springinsfeld." It should not be confused with the flipbook, in which rapidly turned pages produce a moving image. The appeal of the Blow Book lies in the fact that the performer’s apparently arbitrary leafing through the book creates the impression that each successive turn reveals an entirely transformed book, its illustrations exchanged, as it were, by the magician’s breath. (Cf. Tom Gunning, The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion, in: Suzanne Buchan, Pervasive Animation, New York 2013, p. 56f.)
As of October 2026, not in OCLC.
Price: €1,500.00