Idea
A playground between words and images
Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang
Senior Lecturer at Malmö University (Sweden), he holds a Ph.D. in Literature Studies (English). He is the editor of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature.
Reading, for children, is akin to adventure. The idea of catering to children’s playful instinct can be traced back to the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in 1865. Alice's playful exploration of the topsy-turvy Wonderland drives the story.
There are no explicit moral values taught in the book, rendering it a playground for children to engage with their wildest imagination. This book is often credited as the one that marked the end of the era of didacticism in children’s literature, ushering in a new era where authors began producing delightful or entertaining children’s books.
Reading as play
The idea of “reading as play” doesn’t require a perfectly symmetrical combination of textual and visual storytelling; in fact, when the visual only mirrors what the text narrates, the experience is less intense than when there are gaps between those two elements. British illustrator and writer Pat Hutchins’s Rosie’s Walk from 1968, for example, presents two different stories. While the textual storytelling only mentions Rosie the hen’s very normal walk without any conflict, the illustration tells the additional story of a fox’s failed attempts to ambush Rosie throughout her walk. This parallel storytelling is not an easy thing to convey through words only.
Entanglement of words and images open up the possibility of presenting topics previously considered taboo
Ludic entanglement of words and images open up the possibility of presenting topics previously considered taboo for young readers. Where The Wild Things Are (1963) by American author and illustrator Maurice Sendak tells the story of a boy dealing with his anger. Sendak’s play with borders and the progressive expansion of the images until they bleed into the edges of the page is his invitation for the young readers to embark together with Max on his adventure. As the images continue expanding, the text slowly disappears, offering a playful space for the readers. The process of dealing with one’s anger and making peace with oneself is told in those wordless pages: the lack of directing words allows the young reader to create their own engagement with the characters.
Silent books
Wordless picture books are a relatively new format in children’s literature. The lack of explicit textual narrative in the whole book requires the illustrator to master skills such as creation of pictorial metaphors that resonate with children. To some extent, the removal of words also makes it easier to convey difficult, unspeakable things.
In Yellow Butterfly (2023), a wordless picture book by Ukrainian illustrator Oleksandr Shatokhin, war is seen through the eyes of a young girl who finds hope in the symbolism of yellow butterflies. In The Red Tree (2001), Australian author and illustrator Shaun Tan uses surreal, dark images to depict depression, while Korean illustrator Suzy Lee portrays classical music through her wordless book Estate (2022).
Wordless books allow young readers to project their own experience and knowledge onto the story
The language barrier is also broken by this wordlessness, granting any children access to the book. Young readers can project their own experience and knowledge into the book and own the story initially created by adults.
The Père Castor Archives on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register
Roule-galette, Michka, Apoutsiak the little snowflake and Poule Rousse are classics of French-language children’s literature. They are all part of the Père Castor collection, founded in 1931 by author and editor Paul Faucher at the Flammarion publishing house in Paris, France.
Russian, German, Polish, Czech, Dutch, Swedish, Belgian and French designers collaborated on the books, which are now translated into more than twenty languages. And since 2017, the archives of Père Castor are included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
The originality of these children’s books, some inspired by traditional fairy tales, is in the radical change of page layout. For the first time, text and images were on the same page, making the stories easier to read and allowing the images to complement the text.
Mainly located in Meuzac, Haute-Vienne, in the center of France, the archives of Père Castor were gathered continually by Paul Faucher until his death in 1967, and include documents related to his beginnings as a bookseller, but especially the conception, production and distribution of the collection “Les albums du Père Castor” (1931-1967). These include notes, first editions, original drawings, recordings, photographs and even letters from children to Père Castor.
The international Memory of the World Programme collects documentary heritage of international interest and universal value such as the diary of Anne Frank, posters of Cuban films, manuscripts of Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and sound archives of traditional Chinese music. Inclusion on the registry indicates the importance of this heritage, contributes to its elements becoming better known and enables easy access to it, simplifying its preservation for the future.
