the ‘choose your own adventure’ type of book published in North America and Europe
which are linear in pattern regardless of the ‘path’ one has selected. Such a physical
format would not suit the ‘circular’ stories of some cultures. A format that might fit them
better is that of the ‘turnaround’ books, in which the child reads the words (and
sometimes pictures) while holding the book in one direction and then turns the book
over and reads a different set of words (and often the same pictures, but seen from a
different perspective). No publisher in a developing country seems to have attempted
such a format for some of the circular stories common to their language.
Iran is one place in which the physical design of children’s books was very definitely
shaped by strong local cultural forces. Because Islamic culture precludes the use of
pictures for certain types of literature, children’s books in which that kind of literature is
published had to be designed using only script and space. Even with these limitations,
the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children succeeded in publishing a number
of books attractive to children despite their lack of pictures (Pellowski 1980).
On the whole, the physical shape, the illustrations, the size and quality of type, the
overall design of published children’s literature in developing countries has not yet shown
much experimentation in matching local cultural expression with print. Nor, with only a
few exceptions, have there appeared numerous forms of popular print literature (such as
broadsheets, chapbooks, penny theatres) of the type that were common in Europe in the
centuries after the invention of printing by movable type. Some of the inexpensive
pamphlet-format versions of illustrated folk-tales in developing countries (for example,
those produced in Onitsha, Nigeria) come close to chapbooks, but most of them lack the
vividness, the raffishness, the local colour needed to make them truly popular. This may
well be due to the cost of paper; it became relatively cheap in Europe where it could be
produced out of local wood pulp, but it is relatively expensive in many developing
countries, where it usually must be imported. The same is true of printing inks.
Even in societies influenced by strong colonial cultures, it was usually the didactic
that won out over the popular. As Maggi points out for Venezuela,
it is not likely that there existed among us a popular literature written for children...
but it is possible for us to imagine that children read with pleasure, and at times in
secret, the broadsheets, wall posters, and handbills [from Spain] of a humorous
character that circulated in some of our cities during the nineteenth century and
also that they began to be attracted by the pictures and characters and typographic
ostentations of our first almanacs and weeklies. In any case, supposing there had
existed a printed literature for children of a popular nature, it was not preserved;
the only books that have been saved are those containing educational or didactic
reading.
Maggi 1992:11Maggi is specifically writing about printed literature and therefore makes no reference to
the orature of the indigenous populations nor to that of the groups descended from
European and African peoples who settled in Venezuela. Some current Venezuelan
publishers, notably Ediciones Ekare, are attempting to produce children’s books that
not only go beyond the didactic but also reflect, in the stories and illustrations, the
662 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE