child will encounter. Peepo! (1981) shows family life in the 1940s through the eyes of a
very young child—with ‘peepholes’ in the pages: books can be ‘toys’, with holes in their
pages apparently being eaten by hungry caterpillars (The Very Hungry Caterpillar 1970).
These books, and others with more complex paper engineering, are both practical and
beautiful objects.
Artists and publishers have recognised that books for this age group need to be sturdy
and flexible. From the mid-1970s, there was growth in the production of ‘board books’;
the Bodley Head’s series, which included Betty Young’s Farm Animals (1980), is a
particularly innovative example. Talented artists such as John Burningham, Brian
Wildsmith, Rodney Peppe and Helen Oxenbury have brought their individual talents to
the production of alphabet books.
Stories and pictures about everyday objects help the child to see the world represented
in books. Children of this age respond to language in terms of sound, and since the
early days of publishing this has been recognised in the provision of collections of
rhymes, lore, tales and literature which is essentially playful with language. Nursery
rhymes are often the first and one of the most potent forms of storytelling and appeared,
of course, in the earliest books for children. The most comprehensive, and one of the most
popular of modern collections is Raymond Briggs’s The Mother Goose Treasury (1966).
Briggs depicts the blend of the old and the new in that his pictures have clarity and
vigour that appeals to modern lookers and listeners. An American equivalent is Alice and
Martin Provensen’s The Mother Goose Book (1976).
Research into children’s early literary competence and their development as readers
has emphasised the importance of listening to stories and rhymes, and children’s early
play with consciously patterned forms of language. The work of Fox (1993) is an eloquent
statement of the insoluble links between literature and literacy. Mills (1994a) gives a
detailed account of current research on these relationships between stories, early texts
and literacy. Much research into children’s early reading has emphasised the sense of
pleasurable play that children gain from books. Reading enhances their experiences and
understanding. Dorothy Neal White’s classic New Zealand study of the role of books in
young children’s lives, Books Before Five (1954), gives many insights into the connections
between literary and lived experience: ‘The experience makes the book richer and the
book enriches the personal experience even at this level. I am astonished at the early
age this backward and forward flow between book and life takes place’ (13).
Five to SevenChildren’s developing awareness of the structure of stories, and the importance of them
hearing stories read is obviously crucial to their growth as readers as they get older.
Stories that are memorable are often ones that come out of an oral tradition. Of
particular value and enjoyment at this stage of childhood are collections of folk and fairy
stories that have been shaped by centuries of retelling; these stories are powerful in
their content too, dealing as they do with themes of archetypal significance, feelings and
fantasies that are part of the inner experience of childhood.
When reading is new to children, stories are inextricably linked with their play. The
fantastic has its roots in the workaday, and the domestic: playthings, toys, animals are
376 TYPES AND GENRES