Illustration is something that is welcome, even expected, in all books for children. It is not unusual to have children’s books, even ones aimed at a post-infant audience, completely devoid of text; it is understood that children know how to read images. Reading images is undoubtedly a skill, but is it one that is under-valued? The older a child gets, the less reliant on images they are expected to become.

I am increasingly more and more interested in this perceived binary between what is considered for children and what is considered for adults. And it strikes me that, in terms of books and publishing, YA is the battleground between the two. Not only in content, tone and language, but also visual interpretation.

YA books are very seldom illustrated, with the exception of increasingly popular graphic novels (themselves often overlooked for prizes or contested when in receipt of one), and it is rare indeed to find a novel for adults which features more than a stylistic chapter heading. Why is this the case? In my research I examine ways in which museums approach interactive exhibits and learning within their displays. A key theme that seems to cut across both museums and literature is that of this clear divide between what is acceptable, or even encouraged, for children and what an adult should have grown out of enjoying or indeed needing in order to enrich their learning.

Do adults need to be able to ‘read’ an image? Of course. Being able to read an image as an adult is not only a useful skill, but it can also be a joyful one. It can aid in our understanding and world building; it can add nuance that might seem clunky or too obvious in a text. We have all become adept watchers of moving images, we can pick up visual clues that help us to guess plot twists, or at least help them make more sense when they have delightfully blindsided us. Why should we be denied that in literature? Why should a child be forced to lose a whole visual world in the name of “growing up”?

Reading is important, but that reading does not have to be restricted to text to be valid.

About the author: Charlotte Slark is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) Student at QMUL and the V&A Museum of Childhood. Her research examines the social and cultural history of the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood from 1974-2010. Her research interests are museums, structural inequality, class, and bureaucracy.

According to scholar Jenny Uglow, illustrations have been part of children’s publications since the early eighteenth-century due to ideas about children’s education – and, in particular, John Locke’s views of children’s education. Locke believed that children needed pictures of things in order to both entertain and educate them – what good is learning the word ‘lion,’ for example, without any idea of how a lion might look?

Locke’s ideas of illustrating children’s books for practical educative purposes has certainly stood the test of time, yet contemporary picture books attempt to do more than simply educate children on how the world looks. Now, picture books can be used as tools to help children process feelings and ideas. In our recent Centre for Childhood Cultures reading group, we read three picture books dealing with large or difficult topics: The Red Tree written and illustrated by Shaun Tan, The Dead Bird by Margaret Wise Brown with illustrations by Christian Robinson, and And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell with illustrations by Henry Cole.

While these three books deal with vastly different topics in vastly different tones, something that struck me while experiencing these three books was the way that the printed text functioned as an extension of the mood or tone of the book. For The Red Tree, a picture book that deals with depression or perhaps grief, the text is slightly off-kilter – certain letters sat a bit higher than others, as if they had been typed by a broken typewriter. The edges of the letters were rugged, rather than crisp. In And Tango Makes Three, a heart-warming book about a non-traditional penguin family, the text is written in a joyful, clear font. It does not come across as sterile, though; rather, the font looks lived in and warm, while at the same time the letters are easy to read for children just learning their alphabet. At times, words in the text might be bigger or in all-capital letters for emphasis, like the ‘CRAAAACK’ of Tango emerging from her shell. The spelling and size of this onomatopoeia make it integral to the illustration it describes. In The Dead Bird, the text is a straight sans serif font – it seems to not want to call attention to itself, almost blending into the illustrations. Like the words of themselves, the physical text of The Dead Bird is unadorned.

I began to consider how the written text – by which I mean the font and text placement itself – becomes an extension of the illustrations in children’s books. It seems somehow akin to concrete poems, or, poems in which the arrangement of the words on the page convey meaning more than the words themselves – for example, a poem in which words are arranged as drops of rain, or in which curl words in on themselves in a spiral.

Who chooses how to typeset the text in a children’s picture book? Who decides on and designs the font? If the writer and illustrator are two separate people, how do they collaborate on the design of the font? And who is the font for? If a pre-literate child looks at the page, does the font or the placement of the words register? How does the look of the written text inform an adult’s experience of the book when reading to a child?

Uglow writes, ‘however closely writer and artist work together, their work can never ‘mean’ the same, because meaning is bound up with the writers’ system of alphabetic symbols and words, and the artists’ lines, shading and colours’ (140). Yet, when text becomes art, can meaning begin to cross the boundaries between the verbal and the illustrative?

About the author: Abigail Fine is a third year PhD student at QMUL. Her research focuses on Cinderella adaptations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on Young Adult and Middle Grade adaptations.

References and Further Reading

Aube, Christina and Nancy Perloff. ‘What is Concrete Poetry?’ Getty Iris Blog (blog). March 23, 2017.https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/what-is-concrete-poetry/

Uglow, Jenny. Words & Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition. London: Faber and Faber, 2008

Villarreal, Alicia, Sylvia Minton, and Miriam Martinez. ‘Child Illustrators: Making Meaning Through Visual Art in Picture Books.’ The Reading Teacher. November/December 2015. Vol 69, No. 3., p 265-275.