Author Archives: Andrea Immel

The Game of Politics, or The Race for the Presidency, a New Game for 1888: Will History Repeat Itself in the 2024 Election?

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W. S. Reed Toy Company in Leominster, Massachusetts earned a place in the annals of American toy manufacture when it launched “Espirto: The Talking Board”  in the early 1890s to eat into sales of “Ouija” put out by the Baltimore firm Ouija Novelty Company.

Less well known is Reed’s early entry into the board game market, “The Game of Politics, or The Race for the Presidency” issued on the occasion of Grover Cleveland’s run for the White House against Benjamin Harrison in 1888.  Unfortunately, Cotsen only has this promotional flyer, not the actual playing board.  Bonham’s sold one in 2007 and the American Antiquarian Society has a complete set, of course.

Here is a transcription of the rules:

This is the year when we elect our President, and this new and entirely original parlor game is a complete presidential contest in miniature.

It is as lively and exciting a game as euchre or whist for older people and for young people it is as easily learned as dominoes, and gives them, besides, the fun of playing it, a  perfect education in the political government of their country.

This novel and unique game is played on a finely illuminated board, in five colors, with a pack of 48 cards, in six original colored designs, numbered from 1,000 to 10,000.  It can be played with two, four or six players.  Ladders, with numbered rounds (each round counting 1,000), lead to a Major’s Chair, a Governor’s Chair, and a Congressman’s Chair.  The next stage in the game is to reach a seat in the United States Senate Chamber, a correct interior view of which is engraved on the boards.  The race for the White House, a correct view of which makes the center-piece of the board, brings the game to an exciting finish.  The States and the number of votes cast by each, are printed in the middle of the board, and are carried one by one, by the side that throws the highest cards.

Cleveland lost in 1888, but retook the White House in the 1892, defeating incumbent Benjamin Harrison.  Until this November Cleveland had the distinction of being the only American president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

 

 

Walter Benjamin on the Vampires, Ghosts, and Ghoulies in J. P. Lyser’s Abendländische Tausend und Eine Nacht (1838-1839)

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Illustrated half title for Lyser, Abendlandsiche Tausend und Eine Nacht (v.1 Cotsen 30170).

The fairy tale illustrations of Johann Peter Lyser (1804-1870) were praised by the probing  German-Jewish media theorist and cultural critic Walter Benjamin in his essay “Old Children’s Books” published  in the Illustrierte Zeitung in 1924 (Lyser is also famous for his sketches of composers Beethoven, Mendelsohn, and Schumann.)  Benjamin had this to say about the illustrations of the  Abendländische Tausend und Eine Nacht [Thousand and One Nights of the West].

The cheap sensationalism that forms the background against which this original art developed can be seen most strikingly in the many volumes of Thousand and One Nights of the West with its original lithographs.  This is an opportunistic hodgepodge of fairy tale, saga, legend, and horror story, which was assembled from dubious sources and published in Meissen in the 1830s by F. W. Goedsche (Translation by Rodney Livingstone).

Benjamin didn’t single out any of the plates for their “cheap sensationalism” but he might have had ones like these three in mind.  The ghost of Hamlet’s father is suitably spectral in his theatrical shroud, but the horrid creatures in the backgrounds of the other two plates are even more eyecatching. Lyser’s vampire in a kilt (it would take too long to explain the Scottish dress) has summoned a most peculiar assortment of birds of ill omen and spirits.  The libertine Don Juan appears on the verge of tumbling off the hillock into the unloving embraces of serpents, skeletons, monkeys, cats, and who will escort him to hell.I wonder how the Abendlandische Tausend und Eine Nacht was received by reviewers…  Nightmarish imaginings like Lyser’s usually get a rise out of critics, some of whom overlook that some children adore being terrified within relatively safe confines of a book.