My project explores how children’s spontaneous physical engagement with books intersects with the interactive possibilities embedded in their design. While research on children’s marginalia has shown how young readers personalize books through annotation and handling, less attention has been given to how this compares to the engagement with books designed to be interactive, such as lift-the-flap, sensory, pop-up, metamorphic, or puzzle books. This research seeks to investigate not only how children alter books, but also how books invite alteration.
At Yale’s Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection, I will study a range of 19th- and 20th-century interactive children’s books to analyze how their design fosters physical engagement. I will also document any evidence of reader response—such as notes, drawings, and signs of handling—to explore whether interactive features shape distinct patterns of reader engagement. By creating a digital multimedia archive that records how interactive books function and preserves visual and tactile evidence of their use, I aim to develop a resource that will support comparative studies on interactive and standard books reader responses, while also enabling cross-cultural comparisons with the Pollard Collection at Trinity College Dublin.
This research will deepen my understanding of how interactivity shapes reader engagement, informing my dissertation on the educational use of children’s literature. By examining child-initiated and book-initiated interaction, I hope to provide a nuanced understanding of how children’s books engage readers on both a physical and narrative level.