Lothar Meggendorfer (1847-1925) was born in Munich, Germany and attended the Munich
Academy of Fine Arts. He later became an illustrator for the periodicals 'Fliegende Blätter'
and 'München Bilderbogen'. In 1878, he designed his first movable book, "Lebende Bilder",
for his son Adolf's Christmas present. Meggendorfer created a wide array of children's
educational books with some employing intricate mechanics. He preferred four distinctive
formats for his optical toy books: panoramas, slat- and flap-transformations and movables
with coiled copper-wire rivets that he designed specifically for enhanced flexibility. His
most renowned panorama was his "Internationaler Circus", first published in 1887. Once
assembled, the entire work pulled out into a three-dimensional arena. The Munich firm of
Braun and Schneider were the first to publish Meggendorfer's children's books. In 1889, J.F.
Schreiber of Stuttgart and Esslingen began representing the artist, although Braun and
Schneider continued publishing his works into the 1890s.
Meggendorfer's greatest contributions to children's book illustrations were his comedic
sensibility and his technical refinements to moving mechanisms. He frequently designed the
paper mechanisms so that for each individual scene, the child could pull a single tab in
order to cause a series of movements. In 1889, he began the self-named periodical
'Meggendorfer humoristische Blätter', which frequently included his own illustrations and
continued to be published until 1929. Although Meggendorfer's works were rarely published
for an American audience, in 1906 he was contracted with 'The Chicago Tribune' to illustrate
newspaper cartoons. After years of depicting marionettes, clowns, and comedic actors in his
books, Meggendorfer created his own puppets and became a puppeteer, giving performances
around Munich. He died in 1925 at age 78.
After Lothar Meggendorfer's death in 1925, his works were largely forgotten due to the
bombing during World War II which destroyed the business archive of his first publisher,
Braun and Schneider. In the 1970s, Meggendorfer's second publisher, J.F. Schreiber,
discovered a large cache of old production files in its storage facility in Esslingen. These
original drawings and hand-colored lithographs served as printing guides, text proofs and
production files for 64 books and their foreign editions. They were auctioned by New York
dealer, Justin G. Schiller, who eventually sold the collection piecemeal.
Herbert H. Hosmer Jr. (1913-1995), a retired Massachusetts teacher who owned the Toy
Cupboard Museum and Theatre, purchased some items from the Schiller sale, and others from
unknown sources. He exhibited Meggendorfer items in his museum and loaned pieces to local
libraries for educational purposes. Hosmer delivered public lectures about Meggendorfer's
works, utilizing the production proofs to demonstrate their paper engineering mechanisms.
Some materials in the collection were those utilized by Hosmer to identify items for his
records, others served as instructive materials for his Meggendorfer exhibits. Since Hosmer
used his Meggendorfer collection for demonstrations and exhibitions, it is unclear whether
he may have cut some of the moving parts from the large specimen sheets.
