Publication: Playing with the Book

The new publication Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader by Hannah Field and published by University of Minnesota Press is now available to purcahse here. This book benefitted from a Publication Grant which supported both author images costs and publisher production costs.

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 mounted mechanical toys. Richly illustrated, 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.