Come one come all to the display Sandy Stelts and I are co-curating in special collections at Penn State library! Images of old circus flyers and sounds of the old Ed Sullivan show merge in my head as I announce it.

Called “Playing to Learn, Learning as Play: 17th- to 19th-century ‘Play-things’ for Children” it is new exhibition on through June 3 in the Special Collections Library, 104 Paterno Library, on Penn State’s University Park campus. The exhibition features dozens of 17th- to 19th-century children’s ‘play-things’ — including toys, games and books once owned by busy, active children.

The materials range from geographic and moral board games to dissected maps or puzzles; from paper dolls to metamorphic turn-up books; and from antic harlequinades to complex movable books.

Some of these items enabled children to make artifacts themselves, as 17th-century philosopher John Locke urged in his famous dictum in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Learning and playing had not previously been linked together, and Locke argued that children’s learning should be a playful, interactive experience.

The materials in the exhibition trace the interconnected European, British and American trajectory in the development of educational “play-things,” and they all invited participatory engagement with children who were readers, viewers and players. The invitation to participate actively was achieved in different ways: by working with drawing kits, construction toys, storytelling blocks and toy theaters, for example. To enhance this aspect, we displayed items, as much as possible, shown in process of being played with, whether a construction toy or story telling cards or paper doll book.

The library site also includes a couple of lovely photos that I include below taken by Jill Shockey. The first shows a board game with play in process. The Swiss puzzle “To the far west” invites you into the display and travel around winding through the 12 cases. It also shows the travel trajectory many of the items, from Europe to the United States. The second items are   masquerade blocks and flat wooden pieces similarly captured in play. They are three dimensional and two dimensional visual storytelling games, much like today’s head, body and tail books and toys.

My doctoral student Laura D’Aveta took a photo of me standing beside the poster outside the library. I was taken by surprise but thrilled as you can see. Imagine this blog entry as me hailing to one and all to come into our display. I will describe the items, categories, route of the display and the long genesis in later posts.