The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Magic Boat: A Brilliant Vintage “Interactive” Children’s Book by Freud’s Eccentric Niece Named Tom

As a lover of vintage children’s books and analog “interactive” treasures, I was delighted to discover the unusual 1929 gem The Magic Boat: A Book to Turn and Move (public library) — a collection of poems, stories, puzzles, and interactive games designed to “delight and surprise” by Austrian illustrator, Art Nouveau artist, and children’s book author Tom Seidmann-Freud (November 17, 1892–February 7, 1930).

The book is remarkable for a number of reasons, including the author’s last name — while it’s reasonable to guess that Tom was related to the Freud, it’s rather surprising to find out that Tom was indeed the legendary psychoanalyst’s eccentric niece Martha, born Gertrud Martha Freud, who adopted a male first name and began wearing men’s clothing at the age of 15. In her late twenties, Tom met and fell in love with the writer Jacob (Jankew) Seidmann, and the two had a daughter. In 1929, Jacob’s publishing venture failed and he committed suicide. Several months later, Tom too took her own life. She wrote and illustrated The Magic Boat during that final year. A new edition was released in 1981 but the book is, sadly, no longer in print.

From a series of inventive word games to an unusual take on Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare to a promiscuous punching face-off, here is a woman whose ingenious interactive storytelling and paper engineering predated Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes by more than eight decades and Bruno Munari’s pioneering masterworks by three.

As I tend to do on occasion with such interactive vintage treasures, I’ve adapted the book’s movable magic in animated GIFs — which, of course, are not a substitute for its analog whimsy but, in lieu of surviving copies, a fun friendly ghost.

A pull-tab game of “Punch Judy” pits eight opponents — a sultan, a devil, a grandmother, a rich man, a Turk, a crocodile, a jester, and Judy — in sixteen possible punch-pairings.

The story after which the book is titled is a fable about a Chinese man who catches fish that magically transform into other things as soon as he pulls them onto his boat. But as soon as he takes his boat ashore, the magic disappears and all the wild characters transmogrify back into fish. To preserve this irresistible excitement, the old fisherman decides to live the rest of his life on the boat. Passers-by gather every day on the bridge to watch, bemarveled, as he catches fish that turn into “all kinds of wonderful things.” One can’t help but see a parallel to Tom’s own life in this story — a tale of transforming one’s assigned version of reality and choosing to live in that magical new version despite the real world’s disenchanted demands.

Complement The Magic Boat, which is hard but not impossible to find, with a graphic biography of the author’s famous uncle and this delightful vintage pop-up book about Leonardo’s life.


Published February 18, 2015

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/02/18/the-magic-boat-tom-seidmann-freud/

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