Mr. and mrs Brown's adventure with a mouse 1.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown's
adventure
with a Mouse

Some nice magic lantern slide sets from the story 'Die Maus oder Die gestörte Nachtruhe', written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch.

	The original source of this remarkable story is the tale 'Die Maus oder Die gestörte Nachtruhe', from: 'Drei Bilderbogen und ihre Entwürfe', written and illustrated by the German author Wilhelm Busch (1860). In the Netherlands the story was published as 'De muis of De Gestoorde Nachtrust' (The Mouse or The disturbed Night's rest) in several different versions; most of them in verse, once in a while in prose. The text in verse is from the Dutch writer Braga Jr. Sometimes the illustrations of Busch were used; the versions at the left have 12 full-page black silhouette drawings made by P. van Geldrop. The books were published since 1864 It is likely that there are a lot of book editions in other languages too. I do not know them.

Probably the best-known set of magic lantern slides about the story of Mr. and Mrs. Brown and the Mouse forms part of the famous Primus Junior Lecturers Series, as nr 510. A set of eight slides shows their nightly troubles with the mouse. The slides have 'built-in' text strips which makes the addition of a printed text superfluous.

The images below show a striking similarity between the Primus set and another one of an unknown manufacturer (Who copied who?). The sets of Primus always contained eight slides or for longer stories multiplies of eight. The set below contains twelve slides; the numbers 2, 4, 6, en 9 are added here (or left out by Primus). A remarkable mistake attracts attention: in both sets the bedstead initially stands at the right side of the bedroom. The following slides show the bed standing at the other side of the window. In the second set this mistake can be corrected by showing the slide as a mirror image. The Primus set makes this impossible due to the text strip in the picture.





The images of these oblong glass lantern slides are obvious painted from the original illustrations by Wilhelm Bush. Unfortunately slide number 3 that bears the images 7, 8, and 9 is missing.
Below are only four slides of a set from 12 reproduced, because the images are rather similar to the images above and under those. Also these pictures are clearly inspired by Busch.





On the next page you'll find the original English reading that could be declaimed by a lanternist during his performance.