the origins and journaling: Germany and England
The figurines to be cut out to be used without any purpose except to spend time, are born in Germany around mid-19th century. The second industrial revolution was in place and the German printers, who were first of all entrepreneurs, needed a fast market, stuff that cost little and could be bought by many. I don’t really know the story of their birth, but I like to imagine a moustache German father, with a slightly big but well-coated belly, the shirt with the rigid collar, the galosche for when it came out. When he returned home from his print shop he could see his daughters making drawings that then colored, simple and comfortable activity for long winter days. And I also like to think that he saw her cut out the drawings, prepare the glue with the flour, cut out images from the magazines and paste everything together on a notebook and dedicated. Of course, here we are in the happy bourgeoisie that can afford it, but to him social issues matter little; the pressures of more to make his activity fruit. What to print that was accessible to many and then earn on the quantity? Then tell the club he met an English gentleman, English editor, we say the son of Raphael Tuck, sent to Germany to find new markets to their chromographed postcards that sold very well in England. The two men sit at a table together and the youngest tells of the father's affairs, the escape from Prussia, of the business born from a passion of the father for design and above all, from his entrepreneurial breath. I like to think that this is how the idea of creating already carved figurines after solving some technical problems. The two shake hands, sign a pre-agreement between gentlemen and start importing in England chrome figurines, perfect for the fashion of time in which the ladies well waiting to marry as the only goal of life, they spent time creating albums of poetry collections, splashes of watercolor, dried flowers and at that point, even figurines already drawn, what is now called journaling
If the part of the meeting I told is false but likely, it is true that the Germans began a massive production of these minor prints, that the English market was ready to receive sheets and sheets of distellated and colored figurines, which fashion also spread in France and then in the poorest Italy, while in the meantime Mr. ♪ decided to put them together with the kitchen nut, another industrial invention for a world that in many respects promised wealth and beauty, with unlimited confidence in economic growth and technological inventions. They called her Belle Epoque. Then came the Great War and ended the fashion of figurines and journaling. There was no more food and there was no more time. But the leaves of the figurines remained, and sometimes some small collections like the one I have, which bring me back to a time away where everything was beautiful and sweet, the bouquets of flowers were field and the hand that placed them a delicate hand of woman, where the caricatures of some characters were the highest form of evil granted, where it was beautiful to imagine that a hundred years before the damines were sweet and happy, always smiling in their 18th century clothes perennial happy childhood.
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