Category Archives: Conferences

Women Paper Engineers: Work-in-Progress Research Show & Tell for the Movable Book Society 

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By Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

Title slide for Women Paper Engineers talk

On Saturday February 24, Rebecca Rouse and I had the privilege and pleasure of sharing a new research project with the Movable Book Society about Women Paper Engineers (you can watch the talk on YouTube). We began by contextualizing our topic within research on movable books generally. We connected some recurring questions that arise about terminology, the nature of movable books as a genre and with the invisibility of producers in library documentation. We observed that some producers (women) are less visible than others. Accordingly, we designed an initial survey to begin research mapping the field of women paper engineers.

Our questions are:

  • Do you know of any women paper engineers, past or contemporary?
  • Can you direct us to any examples of their work?
  • Is there a female “Meggendorfer,” meaning a woman paper engineer who was or is prolific, innovative, and commercially successful on a mass scale?

Finally, we asked if they were comfortable sharing their email with us so we could contact them. We are extremely gratified by the tremendous response and by the insights and experiences by the respondents, many of whom are movable book makers themselves. We have the work for our project mapped out!

Women Paper Engineers survey questions

We had approached the Movable Book Society due to our interest in women (and girls) who make movable books domestically or commercially. This research interest stems from an article we co-wrote for the Journal of Children’s Literature in Education called, “Understanding the Design Values of Baby Books: Materiality, Co-presence, and Remediation.” In this piece we focused on the materials of baby books and their affordances in terms of interactivity. We became fascinated by women makers and designers of “indestructible” and multisensory baby books and how this work has been credited only recently (see my recent post for more on this article: https://sites.psu.edu/learningasplaying/2023/12/07/journal-launch-and-presentation-analyzing-the-interactivity-of-baby-books/).

I am a recent member of the movable book society and attended several recent formal and informal meetings. I was impressed by the breadth of members’ knowledge, their openness and the genuine good will among the members who range across the spectrum of movable book involvement. I was also struck by the gender of the award winners and some of the comments in the informal sessions. We took the opportunity to extend our research in this context, thanks to the auspices of the new Director of the Movable Book Society Dr. Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Newberry Library. We have all become mutually acquainted through our research on movable books and facilitated by our participation in the Pop-App Centre conferences and journal JIB (Journal of Interactive Books). Accordingly, Rebecca and I derived an informal survey that was approved and sent to all the society’s members as mentioned above.

In our initial survey, we had 25 respondents who shared over 148 names of women paper engineers from all over the world with us! We see this project as a long-term one, and we welcome more thoughts and comments.

We wanted to share this information with the readers of the “Learning as Play” blog and invite anyone interested in participating to email Jacqui at jxr67@psu.edu. Thanks!

Object Talks: Moveable Board Books

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Jacqui Reid-Walsh

In late spring Dr. Emily Aguiló-Pérez (West Chester University, PA) gave a provocative zoom talk as part of the Object Talks: What Books as Material Artifacts Reveal series presented by the West Chester University Center for Book History and the Francis Harvey Green Library Special Collections. Her talk was entitled “Transmediating Texts for Children: The Case of Board Books.”

Dr. Aguiló-Pérez took a material culture approach to board (or baby) books – a little-studied kind of children’s book that can be made of other materials like cloth or plastic. Intriguing to me were the connections she made between board books and moveable books.

In her broad ranging slide-show she raised provocative historical and material connections about the past and present. Notably, she began with a brief discussion of the horn book (often composed literally of board) with a piece of paper protected by horn attached. Since it was small and bat shaped it could be worn on at the waist and be played with after the alphabet was learned.

In her discussion of contemporary board books she includes numerous aspects: the importance of size and shape; the affordances of various interactive components, especially flaps, folds and holes; and how many of these texts are transmediated from picture books or even classic novels. Her discussion of the use by the child players includes the category “chewables” (a perfect term!), as well as referring to other multimodal features like sound.

For instance, in her discussion of a book called What to Do with a Box, she describes it as a folded book. She notes how in the process of setting up the object it can become something else. For example, this could be a tent or a tunnel. Or it could be a plane. And so the child can explore the “box” in ways that follow but also go beyond its intended shape and the ideas the book offers the child.

Close up of What to Do with a Box book.

In her final book discussed, Room on the Broom, she analyzes both material and digital transmediations that may reproduce or shrink or expand the text from the original picture book depending on the textual qualities of the book and the appropriateness of the adaption. She observes how this example both reproduces and alters the original narrative.

She notes that what the board book maintains from the original picture book is its short length and images. Yet at the same time, the push, pull, and slide affordances change various aspects of the book. She observes that the movable parts invite the child to interact with it in new ways – but also that these ways are designated, not open, such as changing the point of view. This aspect aligns the books with what many board books set out to do: present/teach simple concepts to babies. She ends her presentation with an animated version of the book that expands the short text to a 25 minute film that is available on Netflix.

These are only some highlights of her fascinating talk that importantly draws attention to the overlooked category of moveable board books and includes it in the discussion of what is a movable book.

Forms and Formats: flaps and folds—making meanings

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Gettysburg college. Photo courtesy of Bénédicte Miyamoto

Last week I presented at a conference hosted by the East-Central Chapter of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Gettysburg. The town and especially the college are exquisite. The conference theme was “Crossroads and Divergences” and my paper was part of a focused panel called “Folds and Formats: Fitting Knowledge to the Page.” The moderator and organizer was Bénédicte  Miyamoto who is an Associate Professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. The other presenters were Dr. Faith Acker, a research fellow at the Folger Library, who presented a fascinating paper entitled “Shaping Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Folds, Formatting and Paratexts from 1599 to 1790” and Professor Eleanor Shevlin from West Chester University who presented a provocative paper called “ A Matter of Formats: Genre Interplay and Remaking Marketplace Attitudes.”  My paper examined the folds and flaps in both the strip format of the 17th century British The Beginning, Progress and End of Man, and the booklet format of the 19th century Metamorphosis, or a transformation of pictures.   My aim was to contribute to the panel theme about folds and formats in terms of two questions in particular. They were, “Were content and format closely intertwined?” and “How did printers, engravers, or book sellers experiment with new forms and folds of publication with what results.” ?

In the 20 minutes allotted I did not progress much beyond showing images, sharing the questions, and handing out facsimiles for the audience to play with and perhaps speculate with. I shared that my answer to the two conference questions was a resounding yes. Regarding the first question, the format I argue makes or enables different kinds of content, the images and verses, to appear in different orders as they are manipulated by the reader -viewer-player or interactor.  Regarding the second question, in respect to the strip format, the printers used the wood blocks in unusual ways by placing them under the flaps or over the joins made by the closed flaps. (See https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/theconveyor/2017/02/06/transformations-in-print/1-adam_trans/

and

https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/theconveyor/2017/02/06/transformations-in-print/3-mermaid_trans/)

In the discussion after the facsimiles were distributed, one participant, a co-presenter, was intrigued by how the inner images under the flaps form a secret or private space that is  only revealed when the flaps are lifted (Shevlin remarks, Oct 26, 2019). This perceptive insight draws attention to what images are not immediately apparent but hidden beneath the flaps. The mermaid, eagle with child, heart as money bag and skeleton only appear when the double transformation has occurred by lifting both flaps.  Is there a quality that draws them together in this secret space? Or, since the double transformation is achieved in different ways in each panel: in the first two panels this is achieved by turning the top flap up and the lower flap down, while in the last two panels the flaps are usually turned in reverse order, does the pattern of revealing serve different functions? Moreover, in all seen versions, whether 4 or 5 panels in the printed versions and perhaps even more in the homemade texts, the order of these key images remains the same.

Looking at the first and last images for example further questions arise. With the first panel, could the hidden mermaid be a lure for the implied male viewer? (the verses suggest so). Yet, the mythic mermaid by her positioning under Adam/ Eve has a hidden connection with Eve. On the one hand, Eve is created by lifting the top flap of Adam’s torso–perhaps enacting as it were the biblical origin story. On the other hand, by the mermaid’s placement under both biblical figures she may suggest an alternate origin story for women. What would female viewers think?

(See https://sites.psu.edu/learningasplaying/2018/02/16/mermaid-at-the-centre/)

With the last panel, could the contrast between the richly garbed man and his naked skeleton be intended to be a moral shock as well as a conventional memento mori? The first and last images form stunning contrasts and unless the strip is refolded so they are juxtaposed sit at opposite ends of the text.

For their part, the two middle hidden images seem to serve a linking narrative function to me. The eagle with baby and the young man’s heart that chases gold are linked to the final image of the rich man/ skeleton tying these three episodes together. Child, youth, age and death –the stages of man.

I have been discussing the images when the flaps are lifted in the intended order following the instructions. When we disobey the directions and turn contrarywise, we discover incongruities not referred to in the verse, like the merman and a monster made of the lion and eagle in the opposite manner to the Griffin. Yet due to the design and way the text and images are formed, no matter a reader-viewer-player’s patterns of engagement, the inner, hidden images remain

photograph courtesy of Bénédicte Miyamoto

Re: Widdershins

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“Melmillo” by Dorothy Lathrop

In the previous entry Jacqui detailed her experience at the Walter de la Mare conference in Cambridge this past month. Although years have passed since her doctoral dissertation, Reid-Walsh’s current research on eighteen-century turn-up books aligned with her graduate work on de la Mare. By way of arguing that the theme of transformation found in his poems are compatible with the process of critical making, Reid-Walsh proposed to the audience at the conference the construction of a hypothetical turn-up book inspired by de la Mare’s work.

I was struck by the novelty of this idea. As a pedagogical tool, critical making is an incredibly immersive, creative and reflective process. With this in mind I familiarized myself with de la Mare’s poetry and decided to try and create my own turn-up book inspired by the poem “Melmillo”.

Process:
-The process began by reading the poem a few times and thinking about how I wanted to go about starting the turn-up book.
-I took a few minutes to think about how the different lines in the poem could be best incorporated in each flap and how I wanted to convey the transformation of the narrative in the poem.

Turn-up draft, sketching the concept

-It was surprising to me that as I thought about how to draw the elder wood/elder tree (line 2) mentioned in the poem, that I began to think more critically about the meaning of it in relation to the nymph-like nature of Melmillo.

 

Turn-up, first flap open

The mock-up draft:
-Used a blank turn-up book of my own making and began to sketch out my plan for the narrative. The turn-up books are easy to make. Take a rectangular piece of paper, in my case I used the standard 8.5 by 11 letter size. I folded the top and bottom to meet at the center and sketch three lines with pencil where I would cut the flaps.
-The concept was a simple one. Each flap would have an elder tree except the last one in which Melmillo reveals herself as a the “elder mother” of Celtic mythology.
-The idea was for the birds was (thirty-three in total at the beginning of the poem) to be part of the tree itself (leaves) and progressively leave the tree naked in the process of transforming into Melmillo. This made sense to me as the poem speaks of Melmillo’s breast being where the birds went to rest: “All the birds were flown to rest /In the hollow of her breast;” (lines 17-18)

Turn-up book, all flaps open

Admittedly, because of my artistic limitations I was not able to do as much with it with as my imagination would’ve liked. However, the process of making this object was the catalyst to other avenues of research. I recalled Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Elder-Tree Mother” as well as other folklore about dancing goddesses and tree spirits. Throughout my sketching, my curiosity grew and I began to research the symbolism of the elder wood and found affirming information regarding the Celtic, Germanic, and Judeo-Christian connections.

My research is in its beginning stages at the moment but already I have found some interesting sources on Celtic mythology and the Elder Mother. Most of the more Elder-mother/elder-tree specific sources were found in other academic blogs on mythology, however, some recently been published books (Ayn Cates Sullivan’s Legends of the Grail: Stories of Celtic Goddesses and The Book of Celtic Myths) were also of use while looking for information on myths about goddesses.

While looking for the root of the Elder tree’s folklore, the common assumption is that it arises from the plant’s extensive medicinal properties. Part of the mythology attached to it stems from it being thought to have the ability to protect from harm. It was believed that the Elder Mother or ‘Hylde Moer’ (Danish) was living inside of the tree as its spirit. This pairs well with de la Mare’s own interpretation of her in his poem “Melmillo” as well as Hans Christian Andersen’s take on the Elder mother. The transformation that Melmillo has undergone in the beginning lines of the poem is reflective of the process of transformation that is part of critical making. I’d be interesting in doing this exercise with other poems by de la Mare. The prevalent themes of transformation and movement in his children’s literature are suitable for an interactive interpretation of his poems.

 

Widdershins: connecting harlequinade turn-up books to Walter de la Mare’s poetry of transformation

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Mac Vermuelen and myself deep in conversation about de la Mare

Two weeks ago, I presented and animated a session at a conference devoted to reading Walter de la Mare, a British poet, short story writer, novelist and essayist. Although he wrote for adults and children, it is his children’s poetry that has long fascinated me. Indeed, I did my dissertation on his poetry writing during my daughter’s naptime. As I introduced my talk I observed that since she is now married and living in Nashville, the thesis was written a while ago!

When the organizers of the conference had first contacted me, I was thrilled and felt privileged to have the opportunity to revisit de la Mare’s work with my present-day interests in mind. As I immersed myself in his poetry over the summer, I sensed how his brilliant poems of transformation invite a connection with my passion for turn-up books! I submitted a proposal and it was accepted.

The conference was held in the English Department at Cambridge University and in the evening a performance of folk and opera music set to de la Mare’s poems was held at the beautiful Newnham College.  In keeping with the multimodal nature of his work, my talk was called “Widdershins: Transformations and multimodality in Walter de la Mare’s children’s poetry—an imagined metamorphic turn-up book project.” My hinge idea was linking de la Mare’s use of the transformation scene in pantomimes in order to explain how his child figures in his poetry temporarily enter another world to a type of turn-up book derived from the transformation scene — the harlequinade.  I took with me a PowerPoint based on several published harlequinades in special collections, a number of facsimiles based on one homemade religious turn-up book that Penn State owns, and some folded blank paper. My aim was to provoke thinking about how to make a turn-up that could demonstrate materially shifts in perception that the child figures and by extension readers experience when engaging with these poems.

Taken by Anne Welsh, University of London; de la Mare poem about the pantomime, illustration by Harold Jones

 

It was a busy half hour. I shared the images, my thoughts and handed out folded paper sheets and several poems we could possibly engage with –poems where children, girls and boys, through dance and twirling encounter a mysterious other or double. Although there was not enough time to make a book, in our brainstorming session people suggested different types of theatrical metamorphic movable books such as those with volvelles or complex turn-ups that might also work. After the session ended in addition to all keeping the facsimiles, some people took the folded paper away to work with their families at home.

Taken by Anne Welsh, University of London Harlequinade images courtesy of Penn State Special Collections

The experience of attending the conference, listening to brilliant and sometimes famous scholars was inspiring. More importantly since it was a small conference we all attended all the events together and the presence of the publisher grandson Giles de la Mare added a vital intertwined personal and research dimension. I am reading a book by one of the presenters about the sound of poetry and in correspondence with some other delegates. I look forward to continuing to work on bringing my two scholarly passions together.