Experience of the Picture Book

from The Paperboy by Dav Pilkey

As I read through picture books with my daughter I stumble across images and concepts that are part of past worlds. Sometimes these are attitudes about family or women. Some of these I need to put down or gently “disappear” because their world is so far from my world. More interesting are the ones that portray an aspect of material or social culture that’s gone.. or on the way to being gone. I was a paperboy through much of the 80s, so it was fun to find the picture book entitled The Paperboy (1996).

When I see the above picture lots of memories come back.. though I never had a dog to hold the bag for me! But I read this with my daughter, and I have no idea how to talk to her about a paperboy. I tell her that I used to be a paperboy, like this boy.. and that strikes some interest. But who is this person? What’s a newspaper? There’s nobody that corresponds to this position, and I don’t buy a newspaper as I get my news online. I can hardly tell her that someday she can deliver newspapers, yet when I was growing up this was one of the best ways for a kid to get some spending money. It was such a visible and widely noted position that there was an arcade game about the travails of being a paperboy.

Other books run into the same issue, though perhaps in a more fruitful way. I read Corduroy (1968) by Dan Freeman several times each week. I am in the process of getting attached to the little bear who’s “always wanted” to do so many things. While this book is a classic, the world it portrays is leaving us. Remember how Corduroy steps on the escalator and is taken upstairs until he arrives here:

scene from Corduroy by Don Freeman

Corduroy is impressed: “This must be a palace” he says. In fact it’s not a palace, but a department store. I remember the tail end of the era of department stores. They still exist to some degree in Macys and other stores, but they are no longer the cultural touchstones that everyone knows and that children will remember so clearly. This older experience of shopping has been replaced by WalMarts and more specialized discount stores. Even the large department stores that remain feature a very different version of shopping than is evident throughout Corduroy, such as the following scene with the pertly dressed woman offering a box for the bear:

scene from Corduroy by Don Freeman

Literature of all kinds can be thought of like amber.. beautiful in itself, but important to us for perfectly preserving the social values that fell within the representational purview of an author. Sometimes the world captured by a book completely disappears, and in that case the book falls by the wayside. I like The Paperboy, but I probably wouldn’t buy it for my daughter. A book like Corduroy might actually have the imaginative strength to form our views of shopping. By which I mean that if one really looks at Corduroy, it’s quite strange.. but it nevertheless comes to define our current experience. That ability to define the present is perhaps the very definition of “classic.”

Just to expand a little on the idea of the picture book, it gives an aesthetic experience that is unlike most anything else in contemporary America. There’s too few things in American culture that we sit through twice. Plot drives most of our movies and books.. not to mention sporting events. It’s always the roller coaster ride of narrative that carries us through a work.. and when we finish we climb aboard the next ride. And we like long rides. With a picture book the narrative is aimed at a child, and so it is structured and aims at a certain timelessness. The interest is carried along by the beauty of the art itself, and the art is so often gorgeous. These are books that are wonderful to come back to.

What would it mean to make adult books that function like a picture book? The product itself would be a pleasure to hold and feel. The words would not strive for maximum tension on first read, but rather aim for some kind of wisdom. The images would command interest by their beauty. It would be a book that grown ups could re-read for pleasure.. coming back to as often as a storybook for a child. They would differ from picture books for children in their willingness to meditate on life’s contradictions and uncertainties. They would be a constant reminder of our humanity and that of others beyond our own cultural sphere. That’s the kind of book I would love to buy and sit with before I turn in to bed..