ABSTRACT
The process of researching turn-up books, particularly religious ones, has been full of surprises. One is discovering that the corpus of turn-up books is still being located and described since it has been studied so little. Another is recognizing the dominance of one text, The Beginning, Progress and End of Man, particularly in England and, as I have recently learned, in Germany via its translation. As I examined in Chapter 3, this text had a long life and broad geographical range. Published in England from the 17th until the early 19th century, it traveled to America in the late 18th century and was renamed, modified, and generally “repurposed” in both English and German for new child audiences. Adding another surprising layer to these travels, transmission, and reception is the fact that turn-up books were also products of domestic activities during the same era in England and America (again, in both German and English in America). It is rare to discover parallel sets of texts—one in published book and one in unpublished manuscript form. I am still in the process of locating extant parallel examples, and we know neither how many of each type (book and manuscript) exist nor where they are housed.
