At the hippodrome

London. Dean & Son, Circa 1885. 9 chromolithographies (wrappers + 7 chromolithographies) and 6 lithographies. ej i worldcat . org "One of the first publishers of children's books to enter the field of movables, the London-based company Dean and Son created fanciful and charming pages, some featuring anthropomorphized animals. Stiff and sober as the Dean characters appear to modern eyes, there is a playful element in these scenes indicative of a relatively new trend in juvenile books in the nineteenth century. As children's book historian F. J. Harvey Darton has noted, these works aimed at providing amusement and pleasure for children, rather than simply serving as tools for instruction. Interestingly, however much these books delight children with their advanced technology, they firmly reinforce the moral and social context of the day. Dean and Son produced about fifty movables in the last half of the nineteenth century, making the publishing company the leading producer of such works at the time. Nevertheless, the cost of hand-coloring clothes and scenes most likely limited the edition sizes Dean and Son was the first publisher to produce movable books on a large scale. Thomas Dean, who founded the firm sometime before 1800, was one of the first publishers to take full advantage of the new printing process, lithography, which was invented in Germany in 1798. His business was devoted exclusively to making and selling novelty books, or "toy" books, a term publishers began using in the early nineteenth century. His son George became a partner in 1847, and their toy books took over the market from the 1840s to the 1880s. N.B. ".…