Introduction

In this article we discuss aspects of baby-book design by examining four examples ranging across 100 years, from the early 20th century to today. Inspired by Ivar Holm’s approach to understanding “design values” (2006), we examine aesthetic, social, contextual, historical and gendered components of baby books. To draw out these components, we focus on the materiality of books made from a range of contemporaneous fabrics and substances directed to the very smallest of readers: the baby. Our examples include the British Dean & Son’s Rag books series, focusing on What is This? What is That? from 1905; an American book with multiple materials, Pat the Bunny, from 1940; the Italian Bruno Munari’s avant-garde I PRELIBRI from 1980, made up of multiple materials, and the contemporary American Indestructibles series, which are composed of a synthetic material called Tyvek, focusing on Wiggle! March! (2009). Two of our examples are by women designers: Pat the Bunny and the Indestructibles. Three examples are mass-produced, inexpensive and thereby readily available. In contrast, Munari’s presentation format of his set of handmade, tiny books in a case would qualify as a kind of “treasure binding”,Footnote 1 albeit one for pre-literate children.

We group these books into two pairs: one pair characterized by simple design, and one pair characterized by complex design, based on either a drive for durability or the aim to provide a multisensory experience: the Dean Rag books and the Indestructibles books form one set and Pat the Bunny and I PRELIBRI the second. The first pair, though published one hundred years apart, are similarly straightforward responses to the needs of durability, cleanliness and safety for small children. They were invented and designed by creators and publishers to meet these domestic needs. Dean and Son’s Rag books were created in England and the trademark patented around 1905. They ceased publication during World War II (Cope and Cope, 2009, p. 14). The Indestructibles have been published by Workman since 2006 in the United States. They are formed from a synthetic plastic material patented by Dupont called Tyvek.Footnote 2 The tactile and multi-sensory engagement in each is restricted to the materials.

By contrast, the second pair are sophisticated tactile adventures. Pat the Bunny is a much re-printed classic midcentury American baby book. Innovative at the year of publication in 1940, with its inclusion of multiple sensory materials, Pat the Bunny simplifies a Dick-and-Jane type of story to shift the focus to sensory perception and invite the readers into interaction within the book object itself. It has become an influential model for many baby books. The second example, Munari’s I PRELIBRI, takes a modernist approach by focusing on materials alone, presented as a kind of Cabinet of Curiosity that encourages reflexive interrogation of the concept of the codex itself.

We approach these two sets of books in terms of the following four design values:

  1. 1.

    a deep examination of their materiality and narrative elements, in order to draw out their associated playful affordances

  2. 2.

    an understanding of the historical context or “origin story” for each book and how its materiality, aesthetic, and narrative components reflect this context

  3. 3.

    the social and cultural context of the books’ implied domestic usability for the co-players, adult and child and how gender is often an active element here

  4. 4.

    how the more recently published books in each pair, the Indestructibles and I PRELIBRI are remediations or formal refashionings (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) of the earlier published books: the Dean Rag books and Pat the Bunny, respectively.

In order to illuminate these four design values in each example, we bridge hands-on investigation, historical contexualization, and theoretical analysis.

Understanding the Reader(s)

How do we understand the reading of a baby book as a type of interaction? Where does education come into our understanding of this interaction? And how does gender show up in the history of baby books, their production, and the study of them? The baby-book interaction dyad of caregiver and child has been studied from a pedagogical perspective with an emphasis on language acquisition (Rohlfing et al., 2018; Lancaster and Flewitt, 2015), but not from the perspective of play or interaction design. For the designer of playful experiences such as games both digital and analogue, the baby book as a playful object provides a unique site of inquiry. First, the interactor is not singular, but rather dyadic and dynamic between the baby and the caregiver. Second, the interaction is not language-focused but highlights touch as a primary mode of knowledge generation, along with sight. Finally, although the baby book has a codex form, associated with formal learning, the interaction often has no goal other than play, a complex and ambiguous interaction mode.

Ludologist Brian Sutton-Smith has examined the ambiguous nature of play, developing a series of “rhetorics of play” to categorize the different ways in which play has been understood and designed across contexts (Sutton-Smith, 1997). In the context of education, Sutton-Smith observes: “The desire for children to make progress in development and schooling has led to play’s being considered either a waste of time (the view of educational ‘conservatives’) or a form of children’s work (the belief of educational ‘progressives.’) The one view is that play is not usefully adaptive, the other is that it is” (1997, p. 19). Sutton-Smith goes on to discuss that while play and learning certainly share some commonalities in cases of progression of capability and transference of skills, causal relationships are not actually very clear (1997, p. 42). Instead, adults more often “used play as a major technique for reinforcing, invigorating, or controlling children” (ibid, p. 43). Sutton-Smith concludes that while the educational or development potentials of play are too ambiguous to claim with certainty, “successful play experience increases the potential for continued happy playing. But there still remains the issue of whether play need have a function apart from the joy of playing, the associated joy of living, the increases in enjoying one’s own play skills, and the play interests and associations that naturally follow” (ibid, pp. 44–45). Sutton-Smith also brings up the paradox of adult play when the rhetoric of play as developmental is dominant, asking: “If play is a preparation for maturity, then what are the mature doing when they play? Are they preparing for death? Perhaps they are not preparing for anything” (ibid, p. 47). Again, here we see an emphasis on the “purposeless” nature of play, an open quality which can be difficult to accept in our outcomes-driven capitalist context.

Equally ambiguous and fascinating from a design perspective is the centering of touch in the baby book genre as the interaction dyad is usually made up of at least one pre-literate person (the baby). As the design and book artist Bruno Munari has discussed (1985), the sense of touch occupies an impoverished place in the space of education, with sight and hearing dominating instead. Munari argues passionately for the inclusion of touch in education, and acknowledgement of all senses as methods for knowledge generation: “a lot of people, including teachers from different types of school, try to explain visual or tactile facts using words instead of giving the students the opportunity to try things out personally and discover things through touch” (Munari, 1985, p. 3). While Munari cites Marinetti and Piaget as influences, many of his ideas are also closely aligned with the work of earlier predecessors. These include Maria Montessori, who famously wrote: “It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen” (1949, p. 139), and even earlier pedagogical work from the 1820s, as seen in the use of paper modeling in education by Heinrich Blasche and Friedrich Fröbel (Iurascu, 2021).

While some baby books literally generate audio with embedded audio chips or materials that crinkle, in another sense all baby books generate audio in that they facilitate verbal interaction between the baby and caretaker, focused around the exploration of the book object. When we imagine the baby-caretaker pair engaging with the book, it is important to not only think about touch, smell, and taste (which we emphasize here given our focus on materiality) but also about the aural components of the interaction which could include literal reading aloud, but often take on a more conversational and playful character (Lancaster and Flewitt, 2015).

Finally, the gendered ways in which the readers are discussed in this genre is notable. For example, Rohlfing et al. (2018) describe their research subjects as “mother-child dyads,” and the figure of the reading mother is present in other research. Women, however, are less present as creators of hands-on books, particularly within the paper engineering or pop-up community and industry, which develop the most intensely tactile book objects commercially today.

These aspects of baby books—the caretaker-baby dyad, the importance of tactile materiality and the role of women as caretaker, designer, or both, are all highlighted when discussing books for the very young. These children engage with books in multiple sensorial ways—by touch, taste, smell, as well as sound and sight—and multiple active modes—not only looking, listening, but chewing, bending and throwing. Here durability and safety are of primary importance. Further, for practical and health concerns these objects also need to be easily and safely cleaned.

While the impulse to focus on the materiality of the book in contemporary times may seem to stem from nostalgic or luddite attitudes in the wake of digital push-back against paper, or a fetishization of the book form as luxury object, emphasis on book materiality has always accompanied shifts in technological developments related to all book components, including the surface of inscription, printing method, and ink technologies. As observed by Ilgim Veryeri Alaca, “Today, materiality increasingly attracts attention, boosted by a tug-of-war between printed and digital media that expands the frontiers of the reading experience” (2018, p. 60).

Durable Comparisons: Practical Materiality in the Home—Dean’s Rag Books and Indestructibles Series

As mentioned above, the search for materials for books that were easy to write, draw and print on as well as being durable has a long history in the West. These books were directed at a literate adult, often an elite (male) market. In the 19th century, when children’s publishing emerged as a vital force, these needs were transferred to this market with added qualifications of hygiene and safety for child and female caretaker. The Dean’s Rag books were an early answer to this problem. The material was pure cotton. Dean’s use of the term “rag” echoes the history of rag as an essential component in paper-making up to the 19th century, when production switched to wood pulp (Craig, 2019). By contrast, the development of Indestructibles in response to a similar need some hundred years later relies on a synthetic material Tyvek, which is a kind of woven plasticFootnote 3 related to nylon.

In this section we compare the two series of durable books. First, we investigate the claims of the two firms as presented by their respective origin stories. Second, we examine an example of two books foundational to each series: What is this? What is that? (1905) and Wiggle March (2009). We do so in two ways: we engage in a textual-visual analysis of the peritext and content and we perform a hands-on material analysis by touch and sight. We argue that the distinctive material qualities of the books enable both traditional and non-traditional engagements by the child-adult dyad. Finally, we assert that the recent books of sophisticated materials can be interpreted as remediations of the Rag books in creating durable and safe books for very young children.

Origin Stories: Dean’s Rag Books and Indestructibles

Dean and Son was founded around 1800 by Thomas Dean, and since the 1840s have been associated with commercial innovations in books for children. The firm was one of first to make extensive use of lithography and by 1860 were producing movable books, claiming to be the originator.Footnote 4 The company and its later iterations continue to be involved with the toy trade (Haining, 1979, pp. 20–21).Footnote 5

Perhaps due to their interest in design and formats, Dean and Son actively experimented with different types of materials, particularly sturdy yet inexpensive ones. As Cope and Cope note, from the 1850s the company claimed to have printed books on “untearable paper” and at the turn of the century collaborated with paper makers to create an “indestructible paper” with linen content (p. 11). Henry Dean, a director of the company, had the idea of printing a book on cotton cloth with a sewn binding. In 1902 the company approached established author T.A. Polson and fabric artist Will Kidd to create design a prototype rag book—a rhyming ABC book, The Life of a Bold AB on His Ship in the Rolling C. The printing process was elaborate: the cover was printed in red and black on holland fabric, the rest of the book in one colour on hand-bleached calico, the binding was sewn, and the book rolled up and tied with a green ribbon (Cope and Cope, 2009, pp. 11, 13). It was very popular, with the third impression issued in time for Christmas 1902, price 6/-.

To produce these books on a commercial level Dean and Son had to modify the product, and so created a new facility “The Dean’s Rag Book Company” (Cope and Cope 2009, illus. 12, p. 130). The company was aware of the limitations: the art work had to be strongly linear, with colour infill, but no subtle effects and the long reels of bleached cotton had to be fed into large hand-engraved copper rollers with washable dyes in eight colours (Cope and Cope, p. 14).

Dean’s Rag books had a distinctive logo of two dogs unsuccessfully pulling apart each end of an intact rag book (see Image 1). Designed by Stanley Tyreman Berkeley, it was first used in 1905 on the back cover and accompanied by the slogan “Dean’s Rag Books - Quite Indestructible” from 1908. The logo was intended to convey three things about the books: desirability, indestructibility and British manufacture (Cope and Cope, 2009, p. 14, illustrations 15).

Image 1
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Back cover showing dog logo of “What is this? What is That?” (1905) full view with light box. Photo by author

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The three colors are effective, the white and black standing boldly against the red material. The centering of both logo and framed image on the page in landscape style emphasizes the energy of the inset—the stances of the two dogs playfully pulling at each side of the book contrast with the stillness of the book in their jaws. Self-referentially, the image’s back cover states the title: Dean’s Rag Books. The idea of Britishness is evoked: the dog on the right of the viewer appears to be a bulldog but the dog on the left appears not to be. The slogan “quite indestructible” pops out to a viewer—with the ambiguous “quite” suggesting the absolute nature of indestructibility without claiming it. The effect is of a sign much reduced in size. Indeed, when the logo was first designed there was a full scale art work displayed as part of their marketing campaign (Cope and Cope, 2009, p. 14). Dean and Son engaged in comprehensive creative marketing: to demonstrate the indestructibility and color fastness of the books, they had shop window displays where the books were submerged in large bowls of water kept fresh by a continuous water flow from fountains (Cope and Cope, 2009, p. 13).

The Dean’s rag books were published initially for a British domestic market of middle and lower middle-class families at the turn of the 20th century and available in different sizes and at different price points (Cope and Cope, p. 26). Due to their popularity and few, simple words, by 1908 they were translated into several European languages (Cope and Cope, pp. 14, 202).

A hundred years later, the Indestructibles series of baby books are produced for a similar domestic American market, based around continuing needs to care for and engage in early bimodal literacy with very young children. Their origin story combines a domestic, women-centered beginning with a high-tech solution enabled by commercial innovations. Launched in 2005, they are likewise extremely successful, with over 5 million in print.

The books’ respective origins have opposite trajectories: the Dean’s Rag books were founded by an important British publishing house for domestic use. The Indestructibles began with a collaboration between two women, impelled by a domestic need, who approached a large publishing house with their ideas. Artist-teacher Kaaren Pixton and her daughter-in-law Amy Pixton were spurred to creativity by the latter giving birth to triplet sons. According to Kaaren Pixton:

When my triplet grandbabies were chewing and ripping their books, (as ambitious babies are wont to do) I made each of them a gift book out of the same tough material that had been successful in creating collage murals with children in schools. Their enterprising mother, Amy, started the baby book business that would become “Indestructibles®” and I created the first six books.Footnote 6

Amy Pixton corroborates:

When they were babies, they explored everything with their mouths - and books were no exception. (I once pulled a hunk of cardboard from my son's mouth.) I packed all the books into a closet. Around this same time my mother-in-law, Kaaren Pixton, an artist and art teacher, was making outdoor murals using Tyvek. It didn't matter if it got wet-it wouldn't rip or tear. Paper that didn't rip or tear when wet?! That's exactly what I needed for my babies.Footnote 7

The FAQ section on the Workman website addresses the indestructibility, safety and care of the Tyvek books while emphasizing the paper-like qualities.Footnote 8,Footnote 9 Revealingly, in the section on “tensile strength” the technical justification is followed by a photo of two dogs pulling unsuccessfully at each end of an envelope. The similarity makes one wonder if Dupont or Workman were aware of the much earlier Dean company logo. Further, the series title Indestructibles could echo the earlier series slogan “quite indestructible.”

As can be seen, the origin story of the Indestructibles both parallels and contrasts with that of the Dean Rag books. For both, the book material was selected for a specific domestic need and the format is of a baby book. Yet the trajectory of the invention is opposite. The Rag books start as a commercial response to a domestic need, while the Tyvak books start in the domestic realm then switch to commercial production. Both series are successful financially due to their innovative application of specific materials. Notably, the innovation involves using a material out of context—in the first a cambric-like cloth used in shirts and other clothing, and in the second a synthetic material used to protect building sites, in art-making and in medical supplies.

Practical Materiality with Playful Affordances: Hands-On Examination of What is this? What is that? (Dean 1905) and Wiggle! March! (2005)

In this section we examine early examples in the series What is this? What is that? (Dean 1905) and Wiggle! March ! (2006, 2009). The Dean’s Rag book is held in the Special Collections Library at the Pennsylvania State University and is the second in the series. The Indestructibles book is privately owned. The overriding question is: “How does the materiality reinforce the domestic use?” Our aim is to ascertain the properties or “affordances” of the object for an implied child or adult reader-viewer-player or “interactor”, engaging with it through the senses. The approach is drawn from digital media theory applied to material media (Reid-Walsh, 2018, pp. xxi, 11–24). The method is by close tactile and visual examination with the occasional aid of a magnifier and a light box. Due to the age of the Dean book, the fabric is handled gently: carefully manipulated, folded and rolled to understand the flexibility (but no pulling or submerging in water!). The Workman book is handled less gingerly, but invasive techniques like cutting are not used. After consulting the bibliographical information, we progress through the books starting with the peritextual information on the front and back covers.


What is this? What is that? (1905)


The catalogue entry states it is “A picture dictionary for children containing a visual assortment of everyday objects, including utensils, flowers, fruit, tools, toys, household goods, and furniture.” The Physical Description indicates it has 10 unnumbered pages printed on doubled cloth, with color illustrations and measures 15 × 23 cm. Although the rag books were not reprints, this book is a good instance of how they were of the same educational genres as the paper books, here a picture-book primer (Cope and Cope, 2009, pp. 11, 13).

Glancing at the book supports this aim. The front cover depicts a well-dressed Victorian toddler pushing a cart of toys while the contents depict objects suitable to a middle-class, semi-rural life inside and outside a house: living-room furniture like a (coffee) table, hassock, chair, stool, flower vase, grand piano, telephone, clock, books, and kitchen implements. There are toys such as an engine, duck, cow, rocking horse, but also flowers and a row boat and anchor (Image 2).

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Front cover What is This? What is That? (1905) Photo by author

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Each page has 3–5 good sized images. The colors are vivid and the images clearly outlined in black. The images are well spaced and do not overlap into the gutter. The images are not drawn to scale: the grains, flowers, and fruit are the biggest, along with practical items like cup and saucer, matches and toys. Some of the larger images like the row boat at 4 ¾ × 1 ¾ inches look like they could be cut out and used on a felt board game. There are no double-page spreads; the images are discrete. The presentation has no progression, such as alphabetical, spatial or from outside to inside the house. Most objects are domestic in the sense they would be inside or in the immediate environs around a house. Implements like the axe, cask, and badminton game imply an outside use.

Durable Materiality and Play Affordances

The five double-sided pages are of a soft cloth, like that of a cambric garment. The cloth is folded and pinked at both top and bottom edges to prevent fraying,Footnote 10 folded at the right edge and sewn together on the left. The book is made of one long strip of fabric and the last page has small semi-circle shapes cut into the material. The front and back covers are dyed red while the inner pages appear off-white. The printing is multicolored, for the machines could support eight colors at once (Cope and Cope, p. 14). The thin material of each page was examined using a light box so the weave of the cloth is visible (see Image 3).

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What is This? What is That? (1905) page seen with light box and magnifier. Image by author

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The cotton is soft, pliable and light to lift. The pages are not perfectly aligned. The implied child and adult interactors (Reid-Walsh, 2018, p. xxi) could touch the pages and move them easily due to the pinking. The pages are double since they are folded, so easy to grasp. Since each pair forms an envelope, an interactor could place their finger in the middle to grasp the page more firmly. While the conventional design and layout may imply a conventional viewing practice from front to back, the affordances of the material invites other ways. For example, interactors could fold the pages in two in order to view them in juxtaposition. Or interactors could make a roll of a couple of pages since they temporarily “stick” together due to the qualities of the fabric.

No matter the kind of engagement, the aura of the domestic and pedagogical is redolent. The material, the sewers’ device of pinking the edges and the content of the images evokes the first. The second is evoked through the title since the repeated interrogative “what” implies an adult asking questions to a young child, and a child inquiring in turn. The size and softness of the book affords the creation of a cozy pair of co-present interactors who engage with the pages, look, point and talk together in a domestic educational game. Since the material is so soft, a child could even rest their head on the book afterwards or sleep with it in bed.


Wiggle! March! (Workman, 2006, 2009)


In this section we focus on the Indestructibles in terms of materiality and playabilty. Again, our approach is to ascertain the affordances of the material qualities for an interactor by asking “How does the materiality reinforce the domestic?” and the method is close examination using sight and touch. Since the initial books are designed by Kaaren Pixton, we examine an early example: Wiggle ! March! As with What is this ? What is that?, we proceed by examining the book from the covers inwards and then engage with the central content.

Wiggle! March! is privately owned but Worldcat provides the following information. The summary states it “Contains colorful illustrations of farm animals, including a cow, a pig, a cat, and others,” the genre is “novel”, and target audience “For ages 0 and up.” The Physical Description states “1 volume (unpaged) : all color illustrations; 18 cm.” The body of the text is wordless.

The books are seven inches square, composed of twelve pages including the covers, and while there is no obvious binding, the cover is sewn. The thin, light-weight books can be easily stacked to form a small pile. The dominant feature is the brightly coloured images. The initial books designed by Kaaren Pixton are wordless collages while the later ones have minimal text. There are no double-page spreads but the figures on the separate pages may be creatively positioned to suggest close connections between the images.

In Wiggle! March! there are clearly demarcated images of typical farm creatures in their environment. There is no plot progression. The pages usually have a centrally placed animal facing forward or in profile with a secondary creature or plant at their feet. Unlike the Dean book, there is a sense of scale: the images for large animals range from 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 inches and 2 to 1/2 images for smaller ones. Often the context is familial: a baby lamb is placed below the adult, and small chicks by the feet of the hen. The central pages create a sense of a double-page spread: hen and rooster are represented facing one another and with chicks, evoking a conventional heterosexual family (Image 4).

Image 4
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Images from Wiggle! March! (2006) showing two central images facing one another creating a sense of a double-page spread. Private collection, photo by author

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Suiting the habitat, no buildings are visible. The only suggestion of pets occurs in the last two pages featuring a cat and a dog respectively. The only words are those on the front cover: “Hey, baby! Look at these animals on the farm!’ placed just below the duck’s beak. In this way the baby is hailed to engage with the book front to back, a conventional Western approach. Yet, since there is no progression, discovery and story play could start anyplace and proceed in any direction. Since the creatures are usually represented in motion, a caregiver could ask a child what the creatures are doing based on the active words in the title, “Wiggle ! March!”, or make up a story.

Except for the first few books, the series consists of pictures with minimal words. Similar to the Dean’s Rag books being primers of their period, the content of the Indestructibles is not substantively different to present-day board books. They are contemporary primers educating caregivers and babies about a diverse, multicultural world presented in a safe non-threatening environment.Footnote 11 As a material object, the book is attractive for both adult and child interactors since it is lightweight and the square shape is easy to pick up and handle. A newly-bought book is smooth and cool to the touch. The used ones become more wrinkled so the surface acquires texture, making it more interesting to touch while effectively reinforcing the textured visual effect of the art. The durable pages are thick enough to touch and grasp easily and the books are easy for a toddler to carry around.

These observations address the questions “What are the affordances of the respective materials that turn the books into interactive objects?”, “Is the interactivity due to the quality of the materials alone, or is it in tandem with the turn-the-page presentation, and the roles of the double implied interactors as co-readers?” As mentioned, manipulating the pages is the main activity. The wordless collage books grouped by subject offer more narrative freedom while the minimally-worded books invite some active participation. For example, they may suggest actions for the baby to do, as in two books by Lizzy Doyle: Touch your Nose (2022) or Taste the Fruit (2022). As stated on the back cover, they are designed with high colour and high contrast, applying contemporaneous beliefs about babies’ vision.

In terms of affordances, the choice of Tyvek is adult-centered. The main concern is rightly that of protection and hygiene. In terms of affordances, the books are pliable and manipulable for a child in the ways promoted on the back covers: “for baby to hold, grab, chew, pull, and bend” (Doyle, 2022a, b). The books provide a safe, hygienic arena for multisensory exploration. Yet the material is not comforting, nor do the books evoke coziness. Since the books are formed of a prophylactic material such as worn by medical staff during surgery, they evoke a sterile clinical sensation.

As discussed, both Dean Co. and the originators of the Indestructibles wrestled with similar problems arising from the ongoing needs of caregivers and babies with respect to early literacy in two periods one hundred years apart. In each case, the creative solutions arose from innovative applications of existing fabrics: Dean Co. with pure rag associated with clothing in the early 20th century, and the Pixtons’ application of synthetic Tyvek associated with art and protective wrap in the early 21st century. If we approach books as material media artifacts, the Tyvek books can be understood as remediations of the rag books. Remediation is a process associated with media change and discussed at length in Remediation (1999) by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. They refine the term in relation to an earlier usage devised by Paul Levinson (1997, pp. 104–114). Levinson used a linear, developmental approach to media change, understanding “remediation” as an “anthropotropic” process that “improved” or remedied the faults of earlier media. In contrast, Bolter and Grusin define the process as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms.” (1999, p. 273). They consider both technological and cultural aspects of remediation, that include physical, social, aesthetic, and economic aspects (p. 77).

The Indestructibles refashion both materials and content: an instance of remediation both as improvement and formal reworking for a new, different audience. In terms of the first idea, here the solution is not washable rag but a synthetic, protective material enabled by new technology. In terms of the formal refashioning of prior forms that includes cultural and social dimensions, the function of both series as primers is key. Each conveys educational ideas believed by contemporaneous society to be fundamental knowledge for young children. What has changed in terms of the materials, as noted by the Copes, is that the claims made by the Dean company would not stand up to the rigorous testing of the present day (13). The synthetic Tyvek material meets the durability and hygiene safety standards of today.

Multisensory Books in Comparison: Midcentury Accessibility and 1980s Modernist Treasure Binding

We now compare two examples of multisensory baby book design: Pat the Bunny and I PRELIBRI. Pat the Bunny (1940) is a much re-printed classic midcentury American baby book. Innovative at the time, with its inclusion of multiple different sensory touch materials within the book, it has become an influential model for many baby books since. The book’s story is very much in the mode of the Dick and Jane series, with simple, gender-normative narratives of the same time period, but Pat the Bunny simplifies the story dramatically to shift focus to sensory perception, and invite the readers into interaction (See Image 5 and Fig. 1). Black line drawings are colored with a reduced palate in muted tones of blue, pink, and yellow. The book construction is unusual, due to the needs of the material interactions. The book has a plastic spiral binding, so pages can lay flat, and each page is a folded piece of card, allowing for material like the bunny fur to be placed within the page interior, and poke through holes in the card designed for interaction. This folded construction places the fold edges at the turning edge of the page, meaning the pages are thicker and have a rounded edge, easier for a child to grasp and manipulate.

Image 5
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The front and back covers of Pat the Bunny. Image by author

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Fig. 1
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Chart description of multisensory elements in Pat the Bunny. Image by author

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The tight integration of narrative, materiality, and invitation to interaction has surely contributed to the lasting popularity of Pat the Bunny. The power of this integration is discussed by Alaca as follows: “Materiality in picturebooks is at its height when form-related aspects are intertwined into narratives to further the meaning, a strategy that at times extends to inviting the reader to actually contribute to the narrative” (2018, p. 59). In Pat the Bunny, the loosely-sketched narrative of domestic life from the child’s perspective (interactions with parents, a pet, a flower, children playing with each other, etc.) is enlivened by the emphasis on materiality. Through the interaction of touch, and smell, the reader is invited to reach across the threshold of the (usually) smoothly opaque page and into the narrative storyworld.

This playful invitation is not only extended to the child or baby reader, but also to the adult companion, who has another larger frame of reference for understanding the book as a cultural form, and therefore also appreciating the ways in which Pat the Bunny subverts this. As Alaca points out, “As soon as a component of a typical book is altered, the perception of the book shifts and the reader’s perception expands” (2018, p. 62). This expansion of perception may be particularly marked for the adult reader, for whom Pat the Bunny may represent a creative reimagining of the codex form. For the younger reader or baby, Pat the Bunny may instead represent the continuation of the dominant way of interacting with the world, through multisensory exploration, but now with the frame of the codex brought into this playful mode. In terms of the origin story of Pat the Bunny or Dorothy Kunhardt’s design thinking about the creation of the book, we are unfortunately left without a record.

In contrast, Munari’s 1980 I PRELIBRI can be understood through not only direct engagement with the object itself but also through intertextual materials written by Munari. I PRELIBRI exemplifies a modernist approach by focusing on “pure” material. By modernist here we refer to the theories of Clement Greenberg (2018), who emphasized medium centricity as a strategy for achieving the new approach that modernist artists sought, by, for example, emphasizing the flatness of the canvas as opposed to utilizing the flat plane for three-dimensional representation. This form of modernism acted against so-called “kitsch,” against the popularly accessible, and against naturalistic imitation and narratives.

Munari worked in design across many applications both industrial and artistic, and had long held unconventional views on books, and on children’s books in particular. Fourteen years before designing I PRELIBRI, in a collection of essays titled Design as Art, Munari includes a brief chapter on children’s books, where he notes the wisdom of most children in choosing games over books, and traces a general lack of quality in children’s books to the predatory nature of publishers, who, Munari alleges, do not respect the small reader but rather seek only increasing sales from parents. Munari goes on to describe his vision for the ideal children’s book, which he says should have clear, simple and precise images, experiment with different kinds of paper, and present a story that is both simple and complex on themes such as “Time is an abstract thing.”Footnote 12 Even in this earlier imagining of the ideal children’s reading experience, Munari is already thinking in terms of the collection (in this case, the nested collection of different time scales). And indeed, in his later 1980 project I PRELIBRI, he does design a nested collection of book objects (See Image 6; see Fig. 2). An oversized book-shaped cardboard case opens to reveal twelve inset niches, filled by twelve miniature numbered books,Footnote 13 identical in dimension and each marked by number, but distinct in materiality and design elements. The back cover is printed with the phrase, “I PRELIBRI: the generation chain, from child to grandchild.” All books measure 10 cm × 10 cm; all book covers are printed with the same text: “Bruno Munari, LIBRO 1 (or the correct number) Corraini Mantova.” This text appears in one direction on one cover, and the other on the reverse, rendering the books all reversible. Finally, pagination does not include front or back cover exterior, but begins and ends in front and back cover interiors as there is no “endpaper” distinction in these books.

Image 6
scheme 6

Front and back covers, as well as interior organization of I PRELIBRI. Photo by author

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Fig. 2
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Chart description of multisensory elements in I PRELIBRI. Image by author

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There are gender politics at work in the remediation of this pairing. While much information is available about Bruno Munari, his design philosophy and creative process, there is an absence of information on the creator of Pat the Bunny, Dorothy Kunhardt. Ironically, it is the Kunhardt book that has been in the hands of millions of children and parents, while Munari himself had a kind of celebrity artist status, but the I PRELIBRI are less well-known. This may in part be due to the specialized literacies needed to appreciate Munari’s high modernist avant-garde approach to the codex, in contrast with Kunhardt’s engaging and accessible design which features a recognizable narrative and domestic setting. The cost of each book is also certainly a factor: Pat the Bunny, now reprinted many times and available even in a board book edition, is mass produced, available at most commercial booksellers, and sold for around ten dollars. I PRE LIBRI on the other hand is still made by hand, sold through the publisher directly and other specialized shops (like the museum store at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, Canada), and costs over two hundred dollars a copy.

While Kunhardt’s and Munari’s works share an intended audience (very young, preliterate children) and multisensory approach, they are also distinct in significant ways. While Kunhardt’s book is directed toward the child-caretaker reading dyad, Munari’s is accessible to the child reader alone, as it contains no text at all. Both examples do playfully interrogate the book form through multiplicity (Kunhardt with the miniature Judy’s book; Munari through repetition), but Munari’s work is formalist in nature, meaning it stems from a Modernist tradition that seeks to highlight the form itself as separate from content, to re-make the codex anew again through experimentation. Kunhardt, on the other hand, embraces narrative albeit in minimalist form, and creates a deeply integrated fusion of storytelling and materiality. Munari’s project becomes less and less book-like, resonating more with other forms such as the medieval reliquary, the curiosity cabinet, or even the twentieth-century playset. Indeed, it may be that Munari’s work remediates these earlier non-codex forms more strongly than providing a Modernist or aesthetic remediation of Kunhardt’s.

These beyond-the-book resonances could open up Munari’s I PRELIBRI to all manner of creative, emergent use cases. Imagine for a moment, if the tiny books are not replaced in the case, what additional treasures those pockets might come to hold, or be used as a playhouse for dolls or figurines. There is potential in I PRELIBRI for creative flexibility and agency for the interactor; however, due to the high cost of the object as a kind of “treasure binding,” there is some doubt as to how freely adults may allow children to interact with it, especially as it is more likely to be purchased for the shared context of a Montessori classroom rather than in a private home. In the classroom, I PRELIBRI becomes a shared resource for learning, whereas in the home it could become the vehicle of private imagination and creative transformation, even into realms beyond the didactic, embodying the ambiguous nature of play as discussed by Sutton-Smith above.

Conclusion: Learning from the Design Values of Baby Books for the Digital Medium

In this article about two sets of baby books from the 20th and 21st centuries, we have examined how the later books remediate or formally refashion the earlier ones in terms of materials and beliefs concerning the practical needs of baby books for child and caregiver. We divided the books into two sets of design, simple and complex. With the first set, the Dean’s Rag books and the Indestructibles, we discussed how the later series reworks the former most apparently in terms of the materials, both considered durable in their periods, and also in their content as primers for the very young child. Less obvious is the social and cultural remediation, whereby in each period middle-class parents are concerned about hygiene and safety of books for their children.

As discussed earlier, these chronological pairings highlight multiple meanings of remediation whereby the reworking is an instance of both an earlier understanding of remediation as improvement and correcting a fault and more recent ideas of being formal reworking for a new, different audience. In terms of the earlier idea proposed by Levinson new media is understood to “improve” older media that is perceived as lacking—in this case synthetic material versus rag (1997, pp. 104–114). The changes are technological. The term also carries the connotation of educational “reform” where students who are lagging behind are remediated. At the same time remediation understood by Bolter and Grusin (1999) to be “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media form” (273) has a wider scope that carries cultural dimensions and includes “technical, material, social, and economic factors” (Bolter and Grusin, p. 77). This broader approach seems less punitive towards earlier media. Interpreting media holistically through ideas of Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (2003), they propose a complex model for understanding media change within a non-combative, non-apocalyptic approach of comparative media history where new media do not destroy old media. Rather, they stress the principles of continuity and transformation where collaborative and hybrid forms may emerge during times of change. This approach enables both old media and new media to inform one another which in terms of belief systems includes gender, race and class (Reid-Walsh, 2018, pp. 14–15). In the case of the Dean's Rag books and Indestructibles, the function of both series of books as primers convey contemporaneous educational ideas and practices believed to be fundamental knowledge for very young children.

If remediation is interpreted in this long-range perspective, we are interested in how the design values of baby books might inform texts in the digital medium. Here we draw attention to the role and function of materiality in particular, and suggest this as an important perspective for digital designers to consider, even going so far as to consider the material as an actor in design. While the baby-caretaker readers are often referred to as a dyad, in the case of baby books, it may make more sense to conceptualize the interactors as a trio: baby-caretaker-book. This widening of the frame allows us to understand the performative nature of the book object itself, both through materiality and design, which invites or encourages certain types of interactions.