The opening leaf of the 1816 edition of Metamorphosis: or, a Transformation of Pictures with Poetical Explanations for the Amusement of Young Persons provides a reassuring disclaimer:

That we may not mislead our little readers, it is desired they would understand the Mermaid and Griffin to be only creatures of fable, that never did exist. And although Death is represented in the form of a human skeleton, yet this is only an emblem; for Death is not a being but a state.

Such a warning was perhaps necessary because of the startling technology on display in the next pages. By manipulating paper flaps, the child could turn Adam into Eve into a mermaid, a lion into a griffin into an eagle — all while learning about the inevitability of death.

“Moving books” such as this, also known as harlequinades or flap books, became popular with the explosion of cheap printing in the seventeenth century. Metamorphosis was an adaptation of The Beginning, Progress and End of Man, a popular single-sheet pamphlet first published during the English Civil War (the earliest example dates from 1650). As Jacqueline Reid-Walsh points out, the figures in these early editions bear a remarkable resemblance to Charles I — but whether that was a reflection of contemporary fashions or an indication that the pamphlet had political import is hard to tell. Nevertheless, dozens of versions, with varying illustrations and texts, were reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic over the next two centuries.

Benjamin Sands, the writer credited on the American editions — the earliest was printed in 1789 — seems to have been responsible primarily for the continuation of the text (numbers 13–21), which gives the story of Adam and Eve in verse form. He may also have been responsible for aiming these editions at young readers, transforming an older text into a general literacy aid; some editions included a primer of the alphabet and basic numerals.

Several editions move across four panels: in the first, we see how Adam begets Eve, who begets a mermaid, another woman whose speech lures one to ruin. The second shows a lion become a griffin become an eagle, who steals a baby. (Eagles seem to have been a common bogeyman: one of the remarkable eighteenth-century DIY learning aids, made by the Englishwoman Jane Johnson, also warns against the dangers eagles posed to unattended and perhaps unwary infants.)

We then home in on man’s lifecycle: the baby, saved from the eagle, sets out to become rich; by panel four he is a prosperous gentleman — but, of course, death comes for us all. “O MAN !” the last panel exclaims. “Now see thou art but dust; / Thy gold and silver is but rust; / Thy time is come, thy glass is spent; / What is there that can Death prevent”. The skeleton (the mere emblem of the state of death) looms over the dying man in his bed, an arrow poised to pierce him through.

A cheery lesson, to be sure, but pessimism did not seem to diminish the book’s popularity in the slightest. In fact, the physical engagement one had with it inspired many readers to create their own editions: there are a remarkable number of extant amateur manuscripts of Metamorphosis. Yale’s Beinecke Library holds several, ranging from pen-and-ink looseleaf sketches by one young woman to a young man’s bound watercolor volume.

The Metamorphosis was so popular among American children (or their parents) that it was published in translation, within the United States itself. In 1833, a German edition was published in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with new illustrations — including one of a Christian knight tangling with the devil — and an additional poem “In Praise of the Farmer”. German speakers got into the DIY game, too.

The effectiveness and popularity of the moving book as a didactic aid, which brought elements of play into learning, prefigured in some ways the rise of the educational movie or video game. Other classic texts got the same treatment: the work of the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher — and children’s education enthusiast — John Bunyan was illustrated and republished as a movable book, providing a tactile emphasis to its lessons. In an 1819 American edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the shock encounter with the demon Apollyon is hidden, as it is for the Pilgrim himself, behind the ascent of the Hill Difficulty.

In Thomas Wright’s 1889 novel The Chalice of Carden, set in eighteenth-century Buckinghamshire, a nine-year-old girl named Sophie stumbles on a copy of The Beginning, Progress and End of Man in the cottage where she is staying with her deeply religious relatives, Margaret and Geordie.

“But what’s it all mean?” asked Sophie, still lingering, and pointing to the pictures.
“Mean?” said Geordie. “What should it mean? It’s a panorama to amuse little folk like you.”

Sophie is entranced by the visual transformations, though perhaps less by the religious lessons they were meant to impart. For Reid-Walsh, it is the moving book’s capacity for subversion that explains their enduring appeal. After all, what was to stop a child from turning Adam into a “creature of fable”?