Interactive Books: Playful Media Before Pop-Ups

This book is a historical and comparative study of the movable book — media that crosses the borders between game and narrative — as interactive narrative media in relation to the implied and actual child interactors who engage with them. The interrelation among children, interactive media, and participatory culture is usually thought of as a contemporary phenomenon, particularly associated with digital media such as computer games. Reid-Walsh focuses on the period movable books first became connected with children in the mid-17^th century and extending to the early-19^th century, emphasizing the smaller, simpler, portable types of movable books: notably flap books, paper doll books, and related hybrid experiments such as toy theaters and paignion (or domestic play set) produced between 1650 and 1830. Despite being popular in their own times, these texts are little known today, and so draw attention to a gap in our knowledge of children’s print culture by showing how these artifacts are important in their own right, and highlighting the relative simplicity and/ or transparency of their design in relation to the child interactor. Studying moveable books as interactive, narrative media texts on paper platforms, this book considers not only the object but also the roles of the child reader. Since the movable book is a hybrid artifact consisting of words and images and movable components, it crosses the borders between a story, a toy, and a game. Demonstrating the longevity of children as producers as well as consumers of media, this book combines archival research with historical children’s literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies, drawing on both Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists to suggest that new media might bear examination in terms of both old and current theories.