Greetings cards and other publications

All cards are sold with good quality white envelopes. All prices include postage and packing in UK. Please make sterling payments by cheque to Pollock’s Toy Museum Trust, and send to:
99 Judd Street, London WC1H 9NE (please note that this is a mailing address only, and there is no museum or shop)

For overseas orders, please email pasquito@aol.com for information on postage rates and payment.

1.William West, Columbine and Harlequin, 1824, by kind permission of Kate Irvine
A beautiful early toy theatre image from the play, Harlequin and the Swans.
Card size 4"x6" £1

2.Edytha Godwin, The Dolls' Tea Party, c.1910 by kind permission of The Maas Gallery Ltd.
A charming oil painting by an artist’s daughter, which hung in the nursery of the Goodwin family house at Twitchen in Devon.
Card size 4"x7" £1

3.Pollock's New Fairies, c.1880, by kind permission of David Powell
Adapted from a later toy theatre sheet, reflecting the fashions of the 1880s.
Card size 5"x5" £1

4. J. K. Green, Endless Not of Love, 1842. Hand-coloured engraving Card size 5" x 6" £1
This is a composite riddle, with ‘rebus’ picture puzzles around the edge, and word play puzzles in the centre. The back of the card gives the answers. Although in the tradition of ‘Twelfth Night characters’ that were popular in the early Victorian period, this was issued as a toy theatre backdrop.

5. Edwin Smith, Model theatre, with three scenes, 1943, Edwin Smith was famous as a photographer, and his work is currently enjoying a reappraisal and revival. He was also a brilliant graphic artist who loved toy theatre, and made the artwork for the first colour-printed plays issued in the 1940s by Benjamin Pollock Ltd. This tiny theatre, with three tableaux on a revolving stage, was made during the war, apparently out of scraps and offcuts. It has a torch bulb built in.
Card and mixed media Collection Pollock’s Toy Museum Trust, given by Olive Cook. Card size 4.75" x 4.75" (folded in three) £1

6. John Leech, Young Troublesome, or Master Jacky’s Holiday, 1845
This sequence, by one of the most famous early Victorian illustrators, shows the delivery of a toy theatre at a prosperous middle class home, where Master Jacky prepares ‘The Miller and his Men’ (the classic of the toy theatre) and stages an explosive rehearsal. There is no better rendition of how toy theatres were used in the Victorian family.
Courtesy Barry Clarke, Card size 6'' x 4'' (folded in three) £1

7. Edward Ardizzone Mr Ardizzone presents his model theatre, 1947
The great illustrator Edward Ardizzone designed a toy theatre of Cinderella for the Christmas number of the Strand magazine, for which this image was the cover. The performer looks very like the artist himself.
© The Estate of Edward Ardizzone Card size 6'' x 5''

8. Harold Jones Father Christmas, 1935
Harold Jones was a popular illustrator of children’s books, most notably his nursery rhyme collection, Lavender’s Blue, 1954, which has been reprinted many times by Oxford University Press. This is a rare early wood-engraving similar in style to Eric Ravilious, with whom Jones was a fellow-student. .
© The Estate of Harold Jones
Card size 6'' x 4.5''

9. Charles Green, Her First Bouquet, 1868
This beautiful and mysterious watercolour painting is in a private collection. By tradition, it represents the wings of the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, which was only a few doors away from the Redington and Pollock shop. We can see the survival of the pantomime tradition founded over fifty years earlier by performers such as John Rich and Joseph Grimaldi.
Card size 5'' x 6"

10 Malvina Cheek,
The Atom Secrets,1950,
Malvina Cheek painted a set of scenes for a new toy theatre play written by George Speaight, which was intended to be published by the revived Pollock business. In the modern-life story, two children go in pursuit of robbers who have stolen their father’s briefcase, with the help of a local canal boatman and his wife. The folk art of canal boats was appreciated by many of the same people in the 1940s who revived interest in toy theatre, including George Speaight and Malvina Cheek’s friend, Barbara Jones.
Card size 4" x 5"

11.Webb's Theatre
The stage is set with the last scene of Harlequin Robin Hood, with its rotund Father Christmas and pudding. The Webb dynasty were at least as important as Redington and Pollock in carrying on the toy theatre tradition in the East End from the 1850s to the Second World War.
Card size 3.25" x 5"

Toy theatre plays and prosceniums

Black Ey’d Susan, 1830
Black Ey'd Susan, the nautical sensation of 1829, reproduced from Lloyd's characters and scenes, with a newly adapted performance script by David Powell, and sheet of songs for the play. 20 black and white sheets with proscenium and orchestra to colour and cut out, making the model shown here, with the help of an ordinary cardboard box, according to the instructions in the playbook. The prints are on 110gsm recycled paper.

This is a play about a sailor who comes back home to his beautiful wife to find that she is about to be driven out of her home by her uncle because she cannot pay the rent. His captain meanwhile sets his roving eye on Susan, and as he tries to embrace her in the dark, William strikes him with a sword. Condemned to hang from the yard-arm, William’s life is saved in a cliff-hanging finale.

This was produced in September 2007 for the re-opening of the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, with a live production of Black Ey’d Susan that received national reviews. The theatre is one of the best surviving of its date (1819) and belongs to theNational Trust.

The Good Fairy, 1922. This is a combination of a London Underground poster and a toy theatre, which can either be cut up and built, or displayed as a decorative print. The artist was Albert Rutherston, who worked from sketches by Claud Lovat Fraser, a brilliant young illustrator and theatre designer who died young in 1921.

There is a script for the play, but it seems to have been written after the delightful but rather random collection of characters was created, and struggles to contain them in a story about the efforts of Demon Delay to stop the children getting to the pantomime.  With the help of Old Mole and the Fairy Tricity, they outwit the demon by travelling – underground. The proscenium arch is in the form of a tube tunnel opening of the Edwardian vintage.
This is a limited edition reprint of the poster, made in 1990 by Judd Street Gallery, and faithful in every respect to the original, apart from the thicker paper.

£25

Wrapping paper
Some time after he took over the business of his father-in-law, John Redington, in Hoxton, Benjamin Pollock assembled characters from the pantomime sheets of J. K. Green and some policemen he had recently published himself. He made up eight separate sheets, all of which are reproduced in full colour on 110gsm recycled paper, size 700x480mm.

This makes a perfect wrapping paper, and can also be used for papering walls, binding books, and even for cutting out to make your own play.
£1 per sheet. Orders of 5 sheets and over will be packed in a cardboard tube for posting.

Exhibition catalogues and leaflets

Sam Smith – Toys Grow Up
Folded A3 leaflet for a 2003 retrospective of the craft toymaker, Sam Smith, held at Pollock’s Toy Museum, with many colour images, including some not available elsewhere.
£1

The Triumph of Neptune
Laser-printed A4 booklet with colour cover documenting in words and images the 1926 Balanchine-Diaghilev ballet based on Pollock’s toy theatre characters and scenes, with music by Lord Berners, a key work of early Victorian revival. 
£5

Houses in Children’s Books
A6 booklet from an exhibition held in 1998-9, exploring the meaning of houses in a variety of children’s books from Britain, Europe and America, from the 1800s to the present. Includes texts by Alan Powers and a reprint of an article from the 1970s by the architect Alison Smithson on the houses depicted by Beatrix Potter.
£2

George Speaight, a life in toy theatre
A5 laser-printed catalogue by David Powell for an exhibition at Pollock’s Toy Museum in 2003, celebrating the achievements of the late great historian and performer, George Speaight, in the year before his 90th birthday.
£5

William West and the Regency Toy Theatre
This beaufiful colour-printed A4 catalogue, with text by Pollock’s trustees, David Robinson and David Powell, is still available from Sir John Soane’s Museum, cost £15
http://www.soane.org/shop.html#EX