Metamorphosis, or, A Transformation of Pictures, with Poetical Explanations is an early modern “moving book” — a harlequinade of paper flaps, reproduced by The Public Domain Review from American editions printed between 1816 and 1857. Pull the flaps and Adam becomes Eve becomes a mermaid; a lion becomes a griffin becomes an eagle. Mathilde Montpetit’s essay makes clear the transformations were never the point. The book is a memento mori for children, and the last panel shows a skeleton standing over a dying man, arrow poised.

The 1816 Philadelphia edition opens with a disclaimer that reads like a contract, because the pictures about to lie to you:

  • The mermaid and griffin are “only creatures of fable, that never did exist”
  • Death is drawn as a human skeleton, but “this is only an emblem; for Death is not a being but a state”

The genre grew out of the seventeenth-century explosion of cheap printing. Metamorphosis adapts The Beginning, Progress and End of Man, a single-sheet pamphlet first published during the English Civil War; the earliest surviving example dates from 1650. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh notes that figures in those early editions look a lot like Charles I — whether that reflects fashion or gives the pamphlet political import is hard to say. Dozens of versions were reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic over two centuries, with American editions from 1789 onward and a German edition printed in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1833 (new illustrations, including a Christian knight tangling with the devil, plus an added poem, “In Praise of the Farmer”).

The reading public didn’t just consume these books, it made them:

  • Many amateur manuscripts of Metamorphosis survive, including pen-and-ink looseleaf sketches by one young woman and a bound watercolour volume by a young man, both at Yale’s Beinecke Library
  • Some editions included a primer of the alphabet and basic numerals — an older text repurposed as a general literacy aid
  • John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress got the same treatment, with an 1819 American edition hiding the demon Apollyon behind the ascent of the Hill Difficulty, so the reader meets the shock exactly when the Pilgrim does

Reid-Walsh’s reading is that subversion is the form’s real legacy — nothing stopped a child from turning Adam into a “creature of fable.” Montpetit draws the line forward to the educational film and the video game: didactic tools that smuggle learning in through play. A book that shows a child how to dissolve one creature into another has already taught the lesson that pictures can be rearranged.