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Does anybody happen to know what to call 'ein Faltbuch (Leporello)' in English?
I happen to be an English bookdealer based in Germany, but I find I don't know an English term (either a book trade term or something that people would understand).
I've got here a thing called ein Faltbuch or Leporello in German. It's a chain of 20 old postcards showing the delights of Karlsbad (now in the Czech Republic), and they're bound up as a linen hardcover. It's the sort of thing that, a hundred years ago, visitors to Karlsbad -a health spa- may well have bought as a souvenir. Someone must've bought this one in 1893.
Souvenir books like this were fairly common in some European countries, and there ought to be a word for them in English. Does anybody happen to know one?
Thanks, Vamp. My son managed to dig up fan fold book. That's in use in the US, at least.
I'm not sure whether Leporello actually is Italian. My understanding of the term for books is it came from the Mozart character, for some reason or other, and Mozart concocted the name. Leporello keeps a list of obliging women for Don Giovanni and, as the opera progresses, it gets longer and longer and longer, and it has to be folded up so as to fit between the covers. Meanwhile, Don Giovanni carries on with trying to get between some other covers. And the list needs lengthening again.
Used in this book sense Wikipedia offers pages in German, French, Polish and Russian.
1 Answer
- VampLv 79 years agoFavorite Answer
These were still around when I was a child - I was once given a set of Loire chateaux.
As far as I can recall, they were simply referred to as souvenir postcard albums.
However the word "Leporello" is used in English to describe pictures bound into a concertina-fold binding and is actually an Italian word. I see the Internet tells me that the name is taken from the manservant in Mozart's "Don Giovanni"
