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Children’s Book Design
Douglas Martin
Historical IntroductionChildren’s books and toys are grounded in a popular oral and craft tradition but are
brought to a wider audience through mass production. Stories may have a long journey
from the fireside—and pictures from the kitchen table—before their appearance on the
printed page and packaged for the supermarket shelf; and book design is simply an
inseparable and enabling part of this process.
Drawing, writing and copying on whatever materials came to hand must have gone on
for the instruction and entertainment of children from the earliest times, and, although
survivals are understandably scant, it is not hard to reconstruct imaginatively many of
the forms this activity must have taken and its links with speech and reading,
storytelling and the making of records. Features which interest the designer of children’s
books appear in abundance in manuscripts and early printed books, long before the
first true children’s books are to be found.
The theory and practice of book design was better understood within the monastic
scriptoria than it is in most modern publishing houses, and the study of that tradition
(Alexander 1992) is fast becoming as rewarding and relevant for the designer as the
typographic history of the Gutenberg era. Medieval scribes and illuminators undertook
an everyday task like ‘ruling the page for writing’ with a know-how—a geometry become
instinctive—that their modern counterparts lack when faced with the same decisions in
a desk-top situation. Words and pictures were related to each other and inventive
solutions found to functional and decorative questions in manuscripts, with a freedom
which is particularly apposite to children’s book design.
Recent attention has focused on another fascinating group of publications, the
blockbooks (Mertens et al. 1991), which are roughly contemporaneous with the
invention of printing from moveable type. At their most exuberant they present reading
matter through a variety of cartoon frame conventions with all the range and dexterity of
Uderzo or Briggs. These little-known blockbooks extend the historic repertoire that
stimulates modern designers and illustrators, and which includes such materials as
manuscript illuminations and woodcut illustrations, writing manuals and decorated
initials, playing cards and broadsheets, pattern papers and gift bindings, printed games
and novelty books, signs on buildings and vehicles, packaging and printed ephemera.