Schmidt's innovative work on interactive prints will already be known to early modernists through her groundbreaking exhibition, in 2011, and the beautifully illustrated accompanying catalogue, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life. The book reviewed here is a more scholarly volume that takes a deeper dive into the categories of printmaking through which readers could expect to interact physically with their books: they manipulate pages through the addition of hand coloring, cut and sew parts together, tell fortunes with the help of dice concealed in bindings, spin volvelles, raise peekaboo flaps, and combine figures through folding and refolding pages. In her roles at various well-appointed print rooms, and now curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry Library, Schmidt is in the privileged position of being able to indulge a passion for handling rare prints that are normally hidden away. As she points out, the prints themselves provide evidence of early modern curiosity in the worn-down stubs of printed pointing fingers or traces of glue that bear witness to missing flaps.

Throughout most of the book she patiently explains the illusions, sleights of hand, visual puns, and the order of intended physical alterations that were necessary for each interactive print to deliver its secret punch line. Part 1 deals with the range of allusive printed devices and their more expensive doubles in ivory and brass, involving discussions of paper astrolabes, sundials, cryptographic wheels, and other instruments of calculation that might come in the shape of religious figures to remind viewers of the ephemeral nature of time on earth. Part 2, on didactic anatomical images, builds on the ubiquity of religion and prints as mutual aides-mémoire. The anatomical flap books investigated here take off from Vesalius's seemingly straightforward Epitome, made to be cut out and layered to reveal, as to an anatomist, layers of flesh, muscle, veins, and bones. Schmidt then moves to elaborately nested constructions, selectively penetrated according to the artist's intentions and the publisher's abilities, like Remmelin's 1613 Catoptrum Microcosmici, images presented with microscopic detail both as to the arrangement of organs and the omnipresence of God and the devil in things of the flesh. Discussions of interactive instruments and the revelation of knowledge through the reader's direct engagement lead Schmidt to the printer-publisher Georg Hartmann of Nuremberg.

As the subject of part 3, Hartmann provides a rich case study of a publisher whose works had international exposure and whose collaborations tell us about the partnerships necessary to trade in scientific instruments, including astrological charts, crucifix-shaped sundials, and sculptures of complex geometric shapes. In the last chapter, Schmidt ventures to Venice for lascivious flap books, mostly by the Bertelli family, that provided voyeuristic images of courtesans, Turkish brides, and other delights that were evidently appreciated by early modern viewers who were kept supplied with such toys from the South. In this section, in which Schmidt looks at interactive prints as entertainment, she focuses on board games, lotteries, playing cards, and games of chance, which—along with the soft pornography—come with a moralistic punch that devolves to the reader who has just lifted a flap and therefore (lightly) sinned. The censures against gambling and prognostication, enforced more or less stringently depending on place and time, are also discussed here.

Throughout, Schmidt updates Scribner's classic text on antipapal imagery by explaining in detail the many, if monotonous, associations between the pope and the devil involving horned demons and snaky genitalia. Her association between moralizing anatomical flap prints and demonizing Lutheran imagery brings the detailed chapters together. The author provides some printed images so contemporary readers can construct their own interactive prints, and the book includes a website with detailed appendixes of prints and sources. I was disappointed not to find there videos of spinning volvelles and unflapping flaps, which would have mitigated the unavoidably inert images in the text, despite the intricate descriptions of the acts of reader revelation and how they were achieved. But the discussions of the sensory aspects of flaying, disrobing, and penetrating into other realms of knowledge adds a new dimension to the significance of the ownership and reception of printed images in early modern Europe.