Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age

A Century of "Books That Sing"

Justin St. Clair

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000591644
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Languages & Linguistics
• Thema: Publishing

Offering both a short history and a theoretical framework, this book is the first extended study of the soundtracked book as a media form. A soundtracked book is a print or digital publication for which a recorded, musical complement has been produced. Early examples were primarily developed for the children's market, but by the middle of the twentieth century, ethnographers had begun producing book-and-record combinations that used print to contextualize musical artifacts. The last half-century has witnessed the rapid expansion of the adult market, including soundtracked novels from celebrated writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Kathy Acker, and Mark Z. Danielewski. While often dismissed as gimmicks, this volume argues that soundtracked books represent an interesting case study in media consumption. Unlike synchronous multimedia forms, the vast majority of soundtracked books require that audience activity be split between reading and listening, thus defining the user experience and often shaping the content of singing books as well.

Mapping the form's material evolution, this book charts a previously unconsidered pathway through more than a century of recording formats and packaging strategies, emphasizing the synergies and symbioses that characterize the marriage of sound and print. As such, it will be of value to scholars and postgraduate students working in media studies, literary studies, and sound studies.

1 Playtime Reimagined: The Invention of the Soundtracked Book

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214014-2

In the autumn of 1917, most Americans had preoccupations more pressing than children’s entertainment. With the Great War raging in Europe and the Near East, the United States newly mobilized, and the Bolshevik Revolution threatening to turn the twentieth century on its head, a gimmicky collection of nursery rhymes might simply have disappeared into the marketplace. But that’s not what happened. Introduced at Thanksgiving, by Christmas “the Harper-Columbia book that sings” had sold the bulk of its print run, planning for a second book had begun, and the franchise was well on its way to ubiquity.¹ Despite soundtracking American childhood for the better part of a decade, however, the series has faded from our cultural memory. Even academic excavations are few and far between. Other than a reference book aimed at the collectors' market,² only Jacob Smith’s Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (2011) offers any extended consideration of the cultural legacy of Ralph Mayhew’s Bubble Books. And this, as our twenty-first century takes a transmedia turn, is a pity.

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),

[i]n our collective popular memory, the child consumer is a product of the television age and postwar affluence. Yet the notion that television was midwife to the “Youth Market” is as technologically overdetermined as it is chronologically imprecise. More than half a century before television enchanted the baby boom generation, middle-class children had become targets of advertising and prominent figures in corporate dreams of market expansion.⁷

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.

In the Beginning

We're a people obsessed with creation myths, origin stories, and geneses. Such mythology not only underwrites our cultural infatuation with the ever-problematic notion of authenticity, but it also helps to keep the Great Men ambulant. The trouble, of course, is that the underlying reality – whatever it may be – rarely corresponds to the origin stories we spin. As the engineer Stanley Koteks laments in Thomas Pynchon’s novella, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the corporate world disappoints all comers: “In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor—Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention.”¹⁰ And then comes the fine print of adulthood: co-invention clauses, assignment agreements, and other corporate interpretations of intellectual property.

Ralph Mayhew’s singular innovation – or so the story goes – was a “new and Improved Book,” for which he was granted United States Patent Number 1,236,333 on August 7, 1917.¹¹ “My invention,” Mayhew writes in the patent filing,

has for its object to provide a book having a theme or story set forth in text, cuts or music, and having a sound reproducing record or records so that when or before a part or all of said text or cuts or music has been read, the sound reproducing record or records may be placed on the sound reproducing machine and operated.

By this means, the story or song which is printed and illustrated in the book may be heard at the time the text is read, and while the book is open at the cut illustrating the story or song. The theme is in this way brought to one’s attention in various ways at the same time.¹²

The first Bubble Book was commercially produced just weeks after the patent was granted, and the final result looked much as described in the filing: “[a] book having pockets, and talking machine records disposed in the pockets, a story being published by the book through the media of matter printed on the sides of the pockets and matter recorded on the talking machine records disposed in the pockets.”¹³ To stilted language (and stacking prepositions) was Mayhew certainly predisposed, yet his status as Author of the Talking Book was carefully leveraged in the marketing of Bubble Books.

In retrospect, it is rather difficult to assign an origin to the origin story soon in circulation. Whether it was the work of Harper & Brothers, the Columbia Graphophone Company, a result of Mayhew’s own vanity, or a cultural predisposition for attributing all innovation to Great Men of Genius is difficult to say. In any event, Mayhew was quickly cast as the central character in The Story of How Bubble Books Came to Be. Take, for example, this opening paragraph from a 1921 article in Printers' Ink Monthly, titled “New Fields Opened by Appealing to Children: How the Harper-Columbia Bubble Books Were Originated and What They Have Done to Extend the Market for Phonographs and Records”:

Having a healthy curiosity about notable merchandizing successes, I recently sought out the man behind the Bubble Book—the man whose imagination first conceived the idea of combining phonograph records with a children’s book—the man who found out how to make records sell phonographs—the man who sings nursery rhymes to deaf children through their hands!¹⁴

The description starts sensibly enough, but before the sentence is out, has settled somewhere between carnival barking and the vaudeville stage. What follows is as much hagiography as history. Mayhew is hailed as “originator of the Bubble Books,” an American success story who “proved that it pays to fight a good idea through, and to carry it out to the very best of one’s ability, even down to the smallest details.”¹⁵ The account not only endorses the old entrepreneurial saw about hard work inevitably breeding success, but it also reflects the imperial aspirations of America’s burgeoning postwar economy. “Travelers in Porto Rico and some of the Central American countries have been surprised to find the little native children singing nursery rhymes in almost perfect English,” Rhodes reports. “The Bubble Books have done it!”¹⁶

According to Rhodes’ account, Mayhew’s invention resulted from the synthesis of two separate ideas. The first of these was purely promotional: Mayhew, a longtime employee of the publisher Harper & Brothers,¹⁷ was “engaged in the exploitation of the Mark Twain books.”¹⁸ Curious phraseology, that. “The Mark Twain books” sounds a bit like “the Google” or “the Interwebs,” a distancing use of the definite article that, if not ironic, seems to suggest a lack of familiarity with the technology in question. Exploitation, moreover, isn't the first thing that springs to mind when considering the relationship between America’s most celebrated novelist and his longtime publisher, but the new media of the early twentieth century, it would appear, had already sent their traditional brethren scrambling. And, in fact, such was Mayhew’s idea: to use the increasingly popular medium of phonography to promote print fiction. Mayhew hoped “to make up some little 3-inch phonograph records to be mounted on a booklet or card, in which Mark Twain w...