As noted in my last post, I’m currently serving as the organizer for the postgraduate reading group associated with the Centre for Childhood Cultures at QMUL. Our reading group has a research blog, and I’m cross-posting a few of my CCC blog posts here. To see this post (and posts by other members of the group) on the CCC blog, click here . This time I’ve written about fonts in picture books! Enjoy!
According to scholar Jenny Uglow, illustrations have been part of children’s publications since the early eighteenth-century due to ideas about children’s education – and, in particular, John Locke’s views of children’s education. Locke believed that children needed pictures of things in order to both entertain and educate them – what good is learning the word ‘lion,’ for example, without any idea of how a lion might look?
And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, illustrated by Henry Cole