A beautifully illustrated exploration of how Victorian novelty picture books reshape the ways children read and interact with texts
The Victorian era saw an explosion of novelty picture books with flaps to lift and tabs to pull, pages that could fold out, pop-up scenes, and even mechanical toys mounted on pages. Analyzing books for young children published between 1835 and 1914, Playing with the Book studies how these elaborately designed works raise questions not just about what books should look like but also about what reading is, particularly in relation to children's literature and child readers.
Novelty books promised (or threatened) to make reading a physical as well as intellectual activity, requiring the child to pull a tab or lift a flap to continue the story. These books changed the relationship between pictures, words, and format in both productive and troubling ways. Hannah Field considers these aspects of children's reading through case studies of different formats of novelty and movable books and intensive examination of editions that have survived from the nineteenth century. She discovers that children ripped, tore, and colored in their novelty books-despite these books' explicit instructions against such behaviors.
Richly illustrated with images of these ingenious constructions, Playing with the Book argues that novelty books construct a process of reading that involves touch as well as sight, thus reconfiguring our understanding of the phenomenology of reading.
Show moreA beautifully illustrated exploration of how Victorian novelty picture books reshape the ways children read and interact with texts
The Victorian era saw an explosion of novelty picture books with flaps to lift and tabs to pull, pages that could fold out, pop-up scenes, and even mechanical toys mounted on pages. Analyzing books for young children published between 1835 and 1914, Playing with the Book studies how these elaborately designed works raise questions not just about what books should look like but also about what reading is, particularly in relation to children's literature and child readers.
Novelty books promised (or threatened) to make reading a physical as well as intellectual activity, requiring the child to pull a tab or lift a flap to continue the story. These books changed the relationship between pictures, words, and format in both productive and troubling ways. Hannah Field considers these aspects of children's reading through case studies of different formats of novelty and movable books and intensive examination of editions that have survived from the nineteenth century. She discovers that children ripped, tore, and colored in their novelty books-despite these books' explicit instructions against such behaviors.
Richly illustrated with images of these ingenious constructions, Playing with the Book argues that novelty books construct a process of reading that involves touch as well as sight, thus reconfiguring our understanding of the phenomenology of reading.
Show moreContents
Introduction: Novelty Value
1. The Three Rs: Reading, Ripping, Reconstructing
2. Against the Wall: Stories, Spaces, and the Children’s
Panorama
3. The Movable Book in 3-D
4. Ernest Nister Christopher Columbus: The Tale of a
Dissolving-View Book
5. Going through the Motions: Lothar Meggendorfer and the
Mechanical Book
Conclusion: Novelty Book History
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Hannah Field is lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Sussex and coeditor of Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1749 to the Present.
"With impressive archival work, considerable historical
contextualization, and an admirable knack for close reading, Hannah
Field deftly traces how children did, and didn’t, read texts that
demanded engagement from the eye, the hand, and the mind. Playing
with the Book offers a powerful theory of embodied reading that
emerges from a respectful, sustained engagement with these
remarkable books and the children who read them."—Anna Mae Duane,
editor of The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the
Humanities"We may be underestimating the movable text’s place in
the Victorian imagination. In this persuasive and lively study,
Hannah Field reveals how nineteenth-century audiences played with
and perceived toy theatres, panoramas, and mechanical books and
describes modernity’s ferment in these powerfully nostalgic,
ephemeral technologies. Movable novelties provided unique and
engaging sensory experiences in the domestic space and in
exhibition halls, and Field opens a critical window onto these
interactive texts."—Nathalie op de Beeck, author of Suspended
Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of
Modernity
"Such books were made to be handled and used as much as read,
and as such, they offer insight into the vexing question of
children's agency as readers, especially when one looks at, as
Field does, physical traces—ripping, scribbling, coloring—left
behind by child readers."—CHOICE"Field makes a significant
contribution to what seems a niche topic, not least in her argument
that it shouldn't be niche at all. At a moment when the focus of
book history has shifted towards embodied reading and "doing things
with books", such books—often bearing the traces of clumsy
little hands—have a new kind of resonance."—Times Literary
Supplement"A well-written, thought-provoking, and timely
book."—Barnboken"Close attention to embodied engagement and agency
is a strength of Field’s Playing with the Book."—Victorian Studies
"A valuable addition to graduate and undergraduate-level courses in
children’s literature, book history, and Victorian studies...
Playing with the Book teaches readers that we might pave the future
of children’s literature by looking back into the past innovations
and complications of movable books."—ImageText "Field provides
insightful readings and thoughtful considerations of novelty and
movable books."—Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
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