Interactive Books

Playful Media before Pop-Ups

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367346478
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135098148
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

Movable books are an innovative area of children's publishing. Commonly equated with spectacular pop-ups, movable books have a little-known history as interactive, narrative media. Since they are hybrid artifacts consisting of words, images and movable components, they cross the borders between story, toy, and game. Interactive Books is a historical and comparative study of early movable books in relation to the children who engage with them.

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh focuses on the period movable books became connected with children from the mid-17th to the early-19th centuries. In particular, she examines turn-up books, paper doll books, and related hybrid experiments like toy theaters and paignion (or domestic play set) produced between 1650 and 1830. Despite being popular in their own time, these artifacts are little known today. This study draws attention to a gap in our knowledge of children's print culture by showing how these artifacts are important in their own right.

Reid-Walsh combines archival research with children's literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies. By examining commercially produced and homemade examples, she explores the interrelations among children, interactive media, and historical participatory culture. By drawing on both Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists Interactive Books enables us to think critically about children's media texts paper and digital, past and present.

Part I
Historical and Cultural Contexts and Theoretical Issues

Interactive Books: Playful Media Before Pop-Ups provides a historical and cultural examination of different types of early movable books connected with Anglo-American children in terms of their historical trajectory and different formats. I approach early movable books as instances of interactive narrative texts on paper supports—in some ways, precursors of interactive media today on different platforms. In Part 1 of this three-part book, I lay the background for my subsequent discussion and analysis. Here I provide educational and cultural contexts of the development and use of early movable books and give an outline of my theoretical vocabulary.

Part 1 consists of two chapters. In Chapter 1 I survey existing research on the topic, introduce key theoretical ideas about interactivity and learning from the 17th century to the present, and outline my comparative media approach. In Chapter 2 I contextualize the reception of movable books within a culture of domestic activities. Here I discuss how children and their families engaged in different types of practices ranging from sampler making to optical experiments to book writing and making. I argue that these activities and recreations form a DIY (do-it-yourself) culture of the past that enabled children both to read published books and also make their own.

These sets of scaffolding support my discussion and analysis in the body of the book: a review of the work of central scholars who have studied and continue to examine movable books; a summary of key ideas proposed by interactive media thinkers past and present; and a sketch of Anglo-American domestic cultures during the period from the 17th to 19th centuries in terms of educational ideas and practice.

1 Texts and Contexts for Movable Books

Interactive or movable books are unusual artifacts, hybrid objects that look like books but are actually part story, part images, part game or toy. They assert a strong presence in the children’s books market, where they range from simply devised, sturdy board books to spectacular pop-up books with several platforms of movable components. Movable books are also found in digital apps designed for children, from adaptations of classic books to “born” digital artifacts that have no previous material existence. These artifacts include app-based movable books that often evoke the form of paper artifacts and invite children to interact with them in a similar manner.

In all cases, though, movable books remain fragile objects. Children’s movable books tend to be stored in libraries’ reference sections or in special collections and, even if new, rarely circulate due to their delicacy. These artifacts are visible in children’s departments of public libraries but are often only brought out for show-and-tell in read-aloud sessions. Typically, only the sturdiest cardboard books designed for toddlers may be checked out. Care is also required in the digital world. For, indeed, while the interface of a digital movable book may appear simple, its supports (such as iPads and cell phones) are expensive and breakable objects that must be handled with care.

For a number of years, I have studied movable books and narrative computer games for children and youth largely as separate fields. In this account of my research, however, I place aspects of these two areas in dialogue with one another. The result is that each field informs the other by highlighting their respective interactive designs as well as their calls for reader-viewers to engage with them. My focus here is studying movable books, particularly little-known early movable books starting with those in the 17th century that boast simple, yet innovative and interactive designs, which elicit instantaneous visual and tactile engagement by reader-viewer-players. My approach is informed by my earlier study of narrative computer games (such as The Sims), which, similarly to movable books, invite immediate engagement but by the click of a mouse.

When looking at both of these fields, I ask similar, related questions. First, I recall the haunting question of Bodleian curator Clive Hurst, “Are they books or toys?” While this question’s subject may at first seem antiquarian, it falls into step with the line of inquiry contemplated by key digital artist, game maker, and researcher Noah Wardrip-Fruin. In reflecting on his work in the gaming industry, he explains how he has shifted his thinking from a question I’ve found only temporarily useful (“Is this a game?”) to one I have found rewards sustained attention (“How is this played?”).¹ One can just as aptly apply to the study of movable books his shift of focus from the initial genre question, which, importantly, classifies an object, to a subsequent question dealing with practical implementation and function. While my support of Wardrip-Fruin’s way of thinking initially seems to contradict Hurst’s question, the latter is the necessary first question leading to the realization that, if one has not considered an object (such as a book) as a game, one would not think about how the object is “played.”

Both the study of movable books and narrative computer games should focus on the key aspects of interactive design and the engagements these designs afford. For, indeed, the two forms exist as interactive, narrative, “playable media,” a phrase I adapt from Wardrip-Fruin’s coinage regarding computer games. This terminology informs my thinking, approach,² and overarching research questions. Since movable books are a type of narrative media on paper, supporting questions about their design and playability are core. Through looking at movable books as historical interactive media, I draw upon a wide range of researchers and theoreticians while engaging in my own primary archival research. This chapter has two sections. In the first section, I provide a review of key scholars who have delved into this largely under-researched topic. They inhabit several, occasionally overlapping areas that are not often brought into dialogue with one another: researchers of children’s literature and culture, curators, and collectors. The discussion presented in this section is pyramid shaped: the early foundational work of curators and collectors forms the base of my subsequent investigations. In the latter portion of this chapter, I provide an overview across time of interactivity theorists who have informed my thinking, beginning with the present but extending back to when movable books first became connected with children during the age of the Enlightenment.

Researchers of Children’s Literature and Culture

Traditionally, overviews of the field of children’s literature criticism have not included the topic of movable books. The place of these unusual books tends to be marginalized in histories of Anglo-American children’s literature—perhaps because their narratives tend to be minimal and rarely of purely literary interest, or perhaps because movable books are generally difficult to classify due to their complex, hybrid nature. F. J. Harvey Darton wrote the groundbreaking history of the field, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (originally published in 1932, reprinted in 1958, 1960, and 1966, and expanded and revised by Brian Alderson in 1983 [corr. 1999]). While this work remains a core textbook for studying the sweep of Anglo-American children’s literature, it offers only a cursory mention of movable books in relation to the establishment of a close connection between book publishing and the toy trade (a connection sparked by the production of John Newbery’s publications in the mid-18th century and which continues to the present day [Darton 1999, 151]). Darton (and Alderson) mention educational games or “pastimes” (such as board games, puzzles or dissected maps, and cards) and relate them to the invention of paper-doll books by the Fullers in the early 19th century (ibid.). Significantly for my subsequent discussion of interactivity theorists, this discussion occurs in Chapter 9, “The Theorists: Thomas Day, the Edgeworths, and the French Influence.”

Percy Muir’s magisterial study, English Children’s Books 1600–1900 (originally published in 1954 and reissued in 1969), stands out as exceptional in that it includes a chapter devoted to movable books as well as a list of all known books of published and homemade items. Although necessarily dated, Muir’s chapter remains unmatched in the realm of children’s literature criticism. Although falling at the end of the volume and diminutively called “nick-nacks” (Muir 1969, 204), his singling out of movable books as a form worthy of discussion in its own right remains a foundational contribution to the field.

Muir’s chapter is itself organized by type: harlequinades, juvenile drama, paper dolls, the “Toilet” books, movables, and the three “R’s” (a catch-all category encompassing a range of educational games). His descriptions loosely capture the chronological development of movable books and related artifacts. In particular, he establishes links among an early, simply designed type variously called “harlequinades,” “metamorphoses,” or “turn-ups,” and, later, more complex ones. On the one hand, Muir stresses the importance of 18th-century printer Robert Sayer in developing the format, the connection of the most common topics to popular theater, and the possible link to the juvenile drama or toy theater proposed by George Speiaght. On the other hand, he connects the secular harlequinade books to the 17th-century British religious turn-up book and to later American publications (Muir 1969, 204–10). That being said, these connections as made by Muir have not been followed up—and followed through—until my present project. Accordingly, I have chosen to focus on the earliest and simplest types of movable books.

Additionally, Muir describes and discusses later 19th-century movable books boasting progressively more elaborate formats. He reserves the term “movable” for the spectacular inventions of the publishers Dean & Son and ends the account by qualifying that his brief discussion of such “movables” does not reflect the magnitude of their importance or their inventiveness. Indeed, he states that the development of movable books stands as “one of the most remarkable chapters in the development of children’s book[s],” despite the fact that very few of their creators and publishers are known today (Muir 1969, 217).

Excitingly, there is an emerging interest among some children’s literature and culture scholars in researching the movable book format as a subset of the picture book form. Notably, the Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (edited by Matthew Grenby and Andrea Immel) included a chapter dubbed “Picture-Book Worlds and Ways of Seeing,” written by Katie Trumpener. In her chapter, Trumpener proposes that we understand the picture book as a complex visual text incorporating different art forms and drawing on the use of multiple senses (Trumpener 2009, 55). She presents picture books as pulling from three separate traditions: that of the tableau, sketchbook, and panorama. Within the last category she places the spectacular, late 19th-century movable books (which she refers to as “novelty books”) (ibid., 64).

Children’s literature scholars interested in book history are beginning to include discussions of movable books in their research. The late Gillian Brown includes a material-culture approach in her delineation of different types of early movable books. She mentions the importance of tactile engagement and the effect of visual transformations, which in certain aspects she sees as forerunners of interactive media today—as do I (Brown 2006, 39–40). Additionally, influential biographer and critic Brian Alderson has provided detailed information on the subject within the context of the development of children’s publishing in England. The introduction, annotations, and illustrations in Be Merry and Wise: Origins of Children’s Book Publishing in England, 1650–1850 for the Pierpont Morgan Library and the British Library, co-authored by Alderson and Felix de Marez Oyens, represents the first undertaking of such magnitude that offers access to many little-known movable books.

Several different yet representative types of movable books are included in Alderson and Oyens’ Chapter 10, “The Dawn of Levity.” While the titular phrase is taken from Darton’s history in reference to picture books, Alderson and de Marez Oyens invert this relationship by applying it to earlier experiments in which picture books played an important part. The authors describe the creative use of printing in the late 18th century in superlative terms regarding how the range of objects produced “brightened” and “variegated” the “sober, homogenous world of children’s books” (Alderson and Oyens 2006, 118). The chapter itself contains sections (including ones on harlequinades, doll books, toy theaters, and table games) that, working in tandem with occasional inclusions in other chapters, emphasize the innovation and beauty of early movables within a context of explosive creativity in the era’s production of visual prints.³

Recently, Hannah Field, an academic who wrote her dissertation on the Opie Collection, stands as one of a few emerging scholars of children’s literature who are exploring specific movable book formats (such as paper doll books) by combining an overall book-history approach with literary and cultural analysis (Field 2012).⁴ Notably, Bridge Carrington and Jennifer Harding’s edited volume Beyond the Book: Transforming Children’s Literature includes movable books (albeit mainly from the contemporary period). Field’s essay in this volume contributed a discussion of 19th-century movables.

Similarly, academic work conducted by historical-visual youth-culture scholars regarding movable books has looked mainly at the elaborate Victorian “stand-up” books, in large part in relation to the period’s experiments in visual culture. Eric Faden approaches these books as examples of late 19th-century visual culture in the context of early cinema. Both his research area and approach are innovative, for through them he establishes connections between movable books and pioneer cinema texts. Faden analyzes the format’s various ways of creating movement and depth on the page. To do so, he draws on the insights proffered by the field of visual and media literacy as pertaining to children’s picture books. Furthermore, Faden engages in his own primary research combined with interviews of contemporary “pop-up” authors. He goes on to formulate some initial theories on how young 19th-century readers (or “listeners”) engaged with movable books. Particularly, his interest lies in how readers and viewers (contemporary or otherwise) negotiate the balance between linear narrative, visual interactivity, and spectacular effects on a case-by-case basis (Faden 2007, 74). I myself apply and extend some aspects of Faden’s interconnected approach to the overlooked earlier, simpler movable books dating back to the 17th century.⁵

Significantly, but barely noticed in the academic literature, some early movable books exist in published as well as homemade manuscript versions. This area of research has been ongoing for me, and to analyze these books it is necessary to draw on scholars of children’s culture who concentrate their research on juvenilia. Homemade objects in particular are beginning to gain scholarly notice by increasing degrees. Yet even in works such as Matthew Grenby’s admirable, broad-sweeping The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (which covers the areas of manuscripts, household reading, and the beginnings of children’s literature as a field), movable books remain conspicuously absent.

While the term “juvenilia” traditionally denotes works created by famous authors, artists, and musicians at a young age and is bestowed only after the fact when they have crossed into adulthood, I wish to broaden its meaning. Doing so affords opportunities to dovetail with research such as that of Courtney Weikle-Mills on Child-Made versions of the New England Primer and Karen Sanchez-Eppler on children making their own versions of the Swiss Family Robinson series. In this manner, I seek to include the productions of ordinary, literate children in my expanded definition of “juvenilia.”

Although research libraries categorize movable books, along with other homemade items, as “manuscripts,” I do not draw on “manuscript studies” as a field, since this term implies a scribal culture. Instead, I have chosen to classify movable books as “homemade” and draw on work in juvenilia studies as well as two very particular areas: the domestic (often maternal) culture of the Enlightenment and ideas of folk culture as a precursor of “DIY” culture today.

Regarding the tradition of maternal education (which I explore in the next chapter), I draw on the work of feminist scholars such as Margaret Spufford to examine how some literate, economically impoverished, 17th-century women in poor villages crafted homemade literacy tools. I also call upon the ground-breaking work of scholars Shirley Brice Heath Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson in Opening the Nursery Door. Their publication details the discovery of notebooks and the homemade literacy texts of Jane Johnson, a privileged 18th-century mother who made her own literacy and play materials based on her reading of John Locke’s revolutionary ideas for educational play, discussed later in this chapter. The title of Heath’s first chapter, “Child’s Play or Finding the Ephemera of Home,” captures the overlooked significance of this kind of homemade teaching material. Later in my discussion of theories of interactivity, I pull from ideas articulated by both Enlightenment thinkers a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART I Historical and Cultural Contexts and Theoretical Issues
• PART II 17th- to 19th-Century “Turn-Up” Books: Religion, Morality, and Entertainment on Interactive Paper Platforms
• PART III Enacting Domesticated and Fantastical Adventures: 19th-Century Movables Before the “Stand-Up” Book
• Bibliography
• Index