This ultimate book on model kits from the Imagerie d'Épinal Pellerin shows the development of model kits in France over a period of more than 130 years. Ten years after the seminal book on the history of cardboard model making, "From the Second to the Third Dimension", and a long period of preparation, this special publication on model kits from the French Pellerin publishing house is now available.
There have already been publicly available sales lists with illustrations in the numerous literature published about the Pellerin publishing house. However, these usually focused on the much more attractive, popular illustrated sheets with themes such as accidents, crimes, royalty, and warlike events. The model sheets are probably a kind of hybrid. In museums, they are either housed in the graphic arts collections or in the everyday culture department (formerly folklore). There has never been a publication about the model sheets from one of France's most prolific publishers.
During discussions within the "Arbeitskreis Geschichte des Kartonmodellbaus (AGK) e.V.", the idea of publishing a publication containing only the model sheets arose. The first step in creating this book was the digitization of Anne Cablé's typescript and the creation of a table containing the nearly 1,300 model sheets. Through inquiries with well-known collectors of sheets from the Pellerin publishing house and its predecessors, as well as with museums and archives, the AGK received numerous sheet photos or scans upon request. Over time, it was possible to obtain an image of at least one edition of all but 19 Pellerin and Pinot model sheets ever published. This made it possible to create the 160-page, fully illustrated catalog with all the necessary information for each sheet (see the sample pages).
The book also contains in-depth commentary on selected sheets, including a large-scale image of the sheet and a photo of the built model, as well as a typical-looking illustration of the original. Such an illustration could have been available to the designer at the time — no on-site studies were conducted at that time. In-depth study of the now-known sheets and their contents resulted in 16 categories for reporting. For this purpose, sheets were selected for model making that offered a sufficiently high-resolution and sharp image to allow printing in the original sheet size or at least in DIN A3 format.
After finding the desired model building sheets for the 224 pages of the "Commentary" chapter, model builders were still missing. In the spring of 2025, the AGK board asked all club members, participants in the kartonbau.de forum, and visitors to the International Cardboard Model Building Meeting at the Technoseum Mannheim whether they would be willing to build one or more of these models and write a short report about their model building experiences. Within a very short time, almost 100 model building orders were placed. Most of the models could then be photographed against a uniform background. The idea was to depict the models as they appear on the sheet as the assembly instructions.
The appendix contains, among other things, an alphabetical list of sheet titles, a list of sheet titles by subject matter, and a correlation of the sheet numbers of the first editions by Pellerin and Olivier-Pinot before 1888 to the reprints by Pellerin after 1888.
After extensive preparatory work and three years of intensive work, the book on Pellerin's "Constructions" (model kits) is now available in print. For all interested parties in France, a French edition was also produced alongside the German edition. The AGK board hopes that the book will be well received by readers and that the enthusiasm and interest shown by those involved in the book in Pellerin's model kits will spread further. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the book for their help and patience. Without the support of other authors and the large model-building community, such a work would not have been possible. We hope that the table of contents and a few selected pages as sample pages have piqued your interest in the book.
Table of contents
- Dieter Nievergelt: Company history
- Comment on selected model sheets
- Dieter Nievergelt: The architectural model sheets of Pellerin
- Axel Huppers, Dieter Nievergelt: Road vehicles
- Hans Loh, Dieter Nievergelt: Railroad vehicles
- Erich Hofmann, Axel Huppers, Norbert Meier, Dieter Nievergelt: Aircraft
- Axel Huppers, Dieter Nievergelt: Shipping
- Walter Ruffler: Papier in movement
- Thomas Deina: Dress-up dolls
- Hans Werner Grebenstein: Paper soldiers and military dioramas
- Thomas Deina: Stand-up figures
- Dieter Nievergelt: Paper theater
- Dieter Nievergelt: Small dioramas
- Dieter Nievergelt: Lampshades
- Geert Beckering: Games
- Heiko Schinke: Advertising
- Heiko Schinke, Dieter Nievergelt: Catalog: On 160 pages (almost) all of the almost 1300 published sheets are presented with an illustration
- Heiko Schinke: Register: alphabetical and thematic index of the model sheets; allocation of editions before 1888 to those after 1888
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