Blog
10 December 2025
The panto season, along with other seasonal observances, is almost upon us. The spotlight this month on items in Emmanuel’s illustrated book collection is upon a curious and self-styled ‘peepshow book’ about Sleeping Beauty, produced in 1951 for the young at heart of all ages. Dating to the year of the Festival of Britain, this work by the illustrator Roland Pym (1910-2006) shows something of the same mid-century aesthetic. It involves an intricate folding structure in order to tell the familiar fairy tale in six scenes.
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Each scene is comprised of four layers. Every picture has a frame bearing the text. Inside this are two folding sheets with cut-outs one behind the other, and then a background, so as to create an impression of a three-dimensional scene in a dramatically retreating perspective.
So in this first scene a King and Queen invite seven godmothers to their daughter’s christening, and six bestow attributes and accomplishments. On the left of the second folding layer are three fairies with the baby Princess, and on the right the seventh fairy looks on, while on the second folding layer are the other three fairies. But suddenly a chariot appears in the sky (painted on the fourth, background layer), with a wicked old fairy, angry at not being invited.
The wicked fairy issues a curse that at sixteen the princess shall prick her hand on a spindle and DIE. Cue horror! The King and Queen (on their thrones in a Gothic great hall) order all spindles to be destroyed in their kingdom, but the seventh fairy steps forward and modifies the curse: the Princess will not die but sleep for one hundred years and only be awakened by a King’s son.
On her sixteenth birthday the Princess opens a secret door to a room where an old woman sits spinning. When the Princess tries her hand at spinning she pricks her finger and falls at once into a deep sleep, as does everyone else in the castle, but the fairies appear and carry the sleeping Princess to a great bed.
Impenetrable thickets of brambles and trees spring up around the castle. One hundred years pass by, until a Prince, out hunting, hears the tale from an old peasant woman. At once the Prince resolves to waken the Princess and the thicket parts as if by magic to let him pass.
Inside the castle the Prince finds everyone, including the dogs, slumbering where they were when the Princess fell asleep. There are giant spider’s webs around.
The Prince duly finds the Princess, and when he kisses her she awakens with a smile. The spell is broken and everyone wakes up. All the good fairies come to the wedding of the Prince and Princess, who live happily ever after …
During his long life Roland Pym was a painter of murals, often compared with the more celebrated Rex Whistler, and designed the decoration of the Queen’s Retiring Room in the temporary accommodation at Westminster Abbey for the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. He worked as a theatrical designer of sets for plays and operas, but saw his romantic style go out of fashion, although he continued to receive commissions, and also worked as a book illustrator for the Folio Society.
Barry Windeatt (Keeper of Rare Books)