Magic Metamorphosis – The Secrets of a Rare Italian Picture Album Revealed by Thomas Stauss

Collectors who can describe their collections and their searches without prompting yawns or worse are almost as rare as unicorn horns. Thomas Stauss knows how to tell a story. With his background in acquiring antique games and magicians’ apparatus, he was well equipped to recognize what the oddly organized portfolio volume presented to him in a Parisian book shop was meant to be — a “blow book”, a trick book that at first appears to be completely blank but then, with a magical breath blown over it, displays a set of themed images that, with another breath blown, changes into yet another set, and then another, and so on. But whoever commissioned these sets of watercolors in the 1600s had not had the finishing touches made before the sets were bound in a single volume. With a familiar and unassuming style, Stauss turns his discovery and its transformation into a page-turning read that is as magical as any blow book.

Until now, Ricky Jay’s Magic Magic Book (1994) could be considered the definitive work on this book structure and conjuror’s apparatus that arose in the wake of Gutenberg’s printing press. Thomas Stauss’s study now takes center stage and assumes that leading role. Perhaps his training in hydrology and geology — as well as his collector’s focus — instilled the curiosity and patience to accomplish this. Also he has been studying the history of science for over 25 years and, somewhere along the way, acquired the skills in bibliographical science necessary for this project. Stauss wears his scholarship lightly though. Discovery, fact, explanation, and conjecture proceed with fine balance and an engaging pace.

After the prologue recounting his discovery of Disegni Antichi Bizzarri [“Bizarre antique drawings”] Stauss’s first chapter introduces the history, nomenclature, structure, and working of the blow book. Its various methods of construction are clearly described and shown by diagram and photography, and the production team should be lauded for the quality and positioning of images with the explanatory text. No better description of how a performer worked the audience with a blow book has occurred since the mid-17th-century picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, and Stauss uses it to conclude the chapter.

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