Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader

(Paperback)

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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 childrens 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 childrens 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 booksdespite 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.

Reviews

"With impressive archival work, considerable historical contextualization, and an admirable knack for close reading, Hannah Field deftly traces how children did, and didnt, 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 Childrens Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

"We may be underestimating the movable texts 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 modernitys 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: Childrens 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 tracesripping, scribbling, coloringleft 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 booksoften bearing the traces of clumsy little handshave 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 Fields Playing with the Book."Victorian Studies

"A valuable addition to graduate and undergraduate-level courses in childrens literature, book history, and Victorian studies... Playing with the Book teaches readers that we might pave the future of childrens 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."Childrens Literature Association Quarterly

Author Bio

Hannah Field is lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Sussex and coeditor of Space and Place in Childrens Literature, 1749 to the Present.