As his title suggests, Smith’s study focuses primarily on the listening habits of Cold War America, arguing that a “history of the postwar entertainment industry and media consumption in the American home” ought to include “overlooked aspects of phonography.”³ Smith is persuasive, and his cultural history situates spoken-word LPs – from poetry to comedy to sexually explicit records – within the larger twentieth-century media landscape. Ultimately, Smith claims that spoken-word recordings represent a significant example of “media ‘narrowcasting’ during the ‘broadcasting era’” and that narrowcasting and broadcasting are, in effect, inter-reliant media modalities.⁴ Niche-market LPs, for example, could bring content into the home that network television could not, for reasons both legal and economic, and the possibilities and constraints of one medium, therefore, are obviously inscribed – at least in part – by the other. Bubble Books, then, are part of his backstory—or, perhaps more accurately, the backstory to his backstory. In his opening chapter, “Turntable Jr.,” Smith examines how children’s records of the 1940s and 1950s “forged ties between a generation of Americans and the record industry.”⁵ The parents of those children had been children themselves in the 1920s, and thus, raised on Bubble Books in what was then a nascent media environment, they often proved amenable, as adults, to their own kids' increased media consumption. In short, Smith suggests that Bubble Books begat the kiddie disc craze of the 1940s and 1950s, which, in turn, helped underwrite both the ascendency of the long-playing record and also the emergence of industry-driven LP culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

This narrative, of course, is but one pathway in the complicated, occasionally contradictory, and often palimpsestic tangle that is the historiography of media technology, but whatever this particular story might exclude, it attends – admirably – to several items of significance. First of all, it underscores the necessity of considering seemingly peripheral media formations when constructing a nuanced narrative. So-called “dead tech,” media fads, experimental cul-de-sacs – whether outright flops or successes since forgotten – are all important to any sophisticated take on the larger mediascape.⁶ Second, Smith’s trajectory serves as a concrete corrective to a common misapprehension of the relationship between television and the child consumer. As Lisa Jacobson notes in Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (2004),

In fact, by the time the first Bubble Book appeared in 1917, children were well on their way to “becoming full-fledged participants in the burgeoning consumer economy.”⁸ While Jacobson fails to mention the Bubble Book series directly, it nonetheless serves as an excellent case study, occupying a chronological position midway between the late-Victorian roots of juvenile marketing and its televisual apogee. Smith takes note, employing Jacobson’s historical framework to situate (and explicate) the emergence of the Bubble Book series. In particular, Jacobson’s research is useful in appreciating how children’s products in the early twentieth century required carefully crafted marketing campaigns, for while “child consumers ignited corporate fantasies of widening profit margins, they also stirred fears that American families were losing control over the socialization of children.”⁹ It was a fine line that commercial interests had to walk: not just to appear innocuous, but also to appeal to those often predisposed to object.

In the chapter to follow, I extend Smith’s insightful look at the Bubble Book series, shifting from his focus on the historiography of phonograph cultures to the cultural history of the soundtracked book. As I suggest in my introduction, the soundtracked book – when apprehended as a discrete media formation, with its own tendencies and characteristics – offers an idiosyncratic vantage on media culture. Moreover, an inordinate number of soundtracked books exhibit, as their definitional logic, a conflicted relationship with time. From a formal perspective, almost all soundtracked books demand that audience activity be split between readtime (the duration spent visually accessing the print component) and runtime (the duration of the musical recording). This often creates – quite understandably – a crisis of apprehension, the moment of media engagement forever positioned against the tension of competing timelines. Curiously, the content of soundtracked books often echoes this discomfiting duality, frequently expressing dissatisfaction with the present by imagining a future firmly rooted in the past. Hence, my inelegant neologism: schizotemporality, the “split-time” idiosyncrasy that functionally distinguishes the hybrid medium from its constituent parts. Far from being an exception to the rule, the Bubble Book series represents a paradigmatic example of schizotemporal media. As the first soundtracked books ever produced, Bubble Books were a novelty, bleeding-edge children’s media that counterbalanced the promise of the future with carefully re-presented traditional content, negotiating, all the while, the ever-present consumer anxieties of the moment. By combining Smith’s careful work on Bubble Book marketing with a close-reading of their content and form, this chapter teases out the temporal traits and quirks that cast a long shadow on the subsequent century of soundtracked books.