HyperStudio Blog

Our ongoing studio talk series has been a great success. First we had Amber Frid-Jimenez come speak and most recently, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh came to speak about flap books. Jacqui is an enthusiastic and engaging speaker, and her talk was illustrated with many photographs. We couldn’t reproduce them all here (below are some of my personal favorites). However, we did record the talk and you can download an .mp3 file in case you weren’t able to join us.

Jacqui has done fascinating research on the history of children’s interactive narrative media, digging up paper doll games, puzzles, and flap books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. This talk was an introduction to her work. The history of flap books, like their design and construction, is intricate, and their themes draw from disparate realms like the bible, theater or other forms of popular performance. As flap books rose to popularity in the 17th century, they were primarily religious in theme. In the 18th century, the scope of their themes enlarged to include an educational aspect, teaching good behavior and conduct. Toward the end of the 18th century, the books also began to be seen as opportunities for game play. Their history is also a little mysterious. There exists no complete bibliography – no one has any idea how many there are or where they all are. They seem to have been primarily created in England, Europe and America, but again, this is conjecture.

What is truly incredible is the way in which flap-books tell a story. Through words, images, and movable parts, a reader/user of these objects becomes an interactor, more than just an observer. Their actions and interactions become part of the story. Moreover, these objects were not limited to an elite echelon of society. They were relatively cheap and were offered in two versions: one already colored in (more expensive), and a plain black and white version not yet colored in (less expensive.)

Near the beginning of her talk, Jacqui recounted an anecdote that I think captures the gripping and delightful bafflement with which a modern viewer experiences these objects. Jacqui was in the Opie collection at the Bodleian Library at University of Oxford, researching early flap books. A curator came up to her, showing her an object, and asked, “Is this a book or a toy?” And Jacqui remembered thinking, “What is this? What am I looking at? How do I even read it?

Fascinating though they may be, the materials she works with are fragile and little-known, and the very nature of these wonderful little books creates an archival dilemma. What gets lost in the digital archive? How can we recreate the interactive, tactile dimension of these books online? Much of our Q&A session discussed these problems, and this is certainly something that all of us in the Digital Humanities think about and must work toward solving.

A fellow member of the Hyperstudio, Whitney Trettien, introduced Jacqui and is writing her thesis about a related topic, seventeenth-century volvelles, or spinning paper discs used to generate language. She’s posted some wonderful writing about moving parts in books on her blog, and has some amazing images of anatomical flap books.