Information, Medium & Society: Nineteenth International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

This paper questions the continued agency for movable books during the post-digital era. During the thirteenth century the first movable books, featuring volvelles, emerged in Spain. Able to make calculations, they were considered precursors to computers. During the Renaissance, ‘turn-up’ books were integral to medical education due to a shortage of cadavers. It was not until the nineteenth century that the genre was applied to children’s literature. Lothar Meggendorfer was a pioneer of movable books. In 1850, he was only three years of age when Fredrich Froebel introduced “papier-falten” as an “occupation” to his kindergartens. The term “pop-up” was coined by Blue Ribbon Publishing in New York during the 1930s. They would remain a mainstay of early childhood education for several decades. Reflective of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, “haptic” has become a dirty word. In the preceding decade, parents and teachers alike began to prefer e-books. They presented both a corpus of literature and read out loud. Notices of completed tasks were automatically sent. This study explores the question: Have computers supplanted their medieval counterparts?