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The paper gives an overview of children’s book design and illustration in Poland around the year 1968. Considering the number, variety and quality of books addressed to young readers of this time, one can judge how important this sector of the reading audience was for the policymakers in the times of Polish People’s Republic (1952-1989). The graduates from academies of fine arts (predominantly from Warsaw) were responsible for illustrations and design of the released titles. 1968 seems to be the peak year of the internationally recognized Polish School of Illustration. More than 400 artists were active in the field of book illustration at that time. Among the published books there were many avant-garde and original designs. However, this tendency was already present in Polish graphic design in the 1950s, with a sort of a turning point in 1956. The year 1968 was very important in Polish history and brought some political and social changes, although these were not reflected that much in fine and applied arts. The paper discusses artistic quality of Polish illustration for children published around the year 1968. The short analyses of the relevance of graphic layout and illustrations to the verbal contents of the selected books comprises the main part of the paper.

In my paper I investigate how the Scandinavian broadcasting corporations’ children and youth departments were influenced by the changes in norms for children’s media which happened around “68”. My analysis is influenced by new work on Scandinavian “68”, which has shown that institutions in the region were very receptive towards the ideas held by rebelling youth. I look at how radical ideas about children’s media culture made their way in to the well-established broadcasting institutions and what expression they found when negotiated in policy papers and concrete programs. The analysis is made in three steps. First I scrutinize the Scandinavian “68” historiography to find out which ideas that has been deemed prominent within the regions youth rebellion and how these can be operationalized for an analysis of children’s television. Secondly, I analyze one of the major events in Scandinavian “68” regarding children’s media: the publication of Gunilla Ambjörnsson’s Trash Culture for Children and the symposium at Hässleby Castle in 1969, which the Nordic Council initiated because of all the big debate the book caused. Thirdly, I investigate how the main points from the book and the subsequent symposium made their way into the children and youth departments of the national broadcasters in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as well as the shared policies and programs made together by these departments within the Nordic broadcasting union, Nordvision.

Caroline by Pierre Probst is a series that marked the Glorious Thirties. The little heroine, created in 1953 for the collection « Les Grands Albums Hachette », accompagnied at least three generations of young readers with 44 adventures in 54 years. More than a half of these picturebooks have mobility and tourism as main theme. Pierre Probst seems to use the series like a « metaphor » of the journey, in accordance with an important proposal by Michel de Certeau. He is a geographer in the etymological meaning : he tales and draws (graphêin) the Earth (gê). In this paper, we will analyze the 26 picturebooks with a spatial theme in order to show that Probst is a « spaces maker » and that he uses serial, diegetical and pictorial spaces to turn the series in what we decided to call a « geographer-series ».

When children’s books travel from the source literary system to the target one, not only is the written text translated or adapted but also other elements, such as the paratextual ones, are often deeply affected in order to make a work acceptable by the target audience. Indeed, the insertion of a book in a particular series (in its function as paratext) renders the work more easily identifiable – to adults – with specific editorial conventions of the literary production for children such as the age recommendation, the written style, and the layout. These are the elements which guide adult buyers and may be decisive to a children’s book editorial success or failure.Since such editorial conventions usually belong to a specific literary system and therefore may vary from culture to culture, the study of paratextual elements in translation is becoming more and more significant and it is opening up new research opportunities. For this reason, this paper conducts an editorial study of how paratext is translated and adapted during the translation process. In particular, this paper firstly looks at how the paratext in picturebooks (series, covers and the titles, the back covers and the blurbs, as well as the size of the book itself) is adapted in order to meet cultural standards of the target literary system. Picturebooks written and illustrated by the Finnish author and illustrator, Mauri Kunnas, will be used as a case study together with the relevant translations into Italian. Secondly, the paper opens a discussion from a diachronic perspective of how the Italian publisher’s view has developed in the last three decades. Finally, the paper will reveal the different actors involved in the translation process showing that, although translations of children’s books are polyphonic works, the paratext clearly remains the area where the editor’s voice is more audible compared to the translator’s one.

The aim of this article is to present my job as a book conservator as indissociable: practical interventions are always drawn on scientific and historical observations. Being a specialist in movable book conservation for years made me realise that only the visible treatments were recorded and could be studied later on. However, numerous aspects are related to the context of creation of the object and are left behind without any complete documentation on the "behind the scenes". We hope that this paper will bring to light the conservation process as a whole which should be shared and preserved by all.

The paper aims to establish a relationship between the character of Mary Poppins, created by Pamela Travers in 1934, and the theory of play elaborated by Johan Huizinga in the same 1930’s time period. Provided with magical powers, Mary Poppins materializes both from the fairies of the old popular tradition and from the literary character of the governess, and introduces the play into the everyday life, establishing rules in the disorder of a world which has forgotten what play is. Besides, the purpose of the paper is also to define the relationship correlating the character of Mary Poppins with the concepts of « drive of life » and of « reparation » developed by Melanie Klein, whose works began to be known in Great Britain in the interwar period. Between psychology, literature, sciences of play, or even pacifist ideology, lines of demarcation emerge, which pave the way for new ones.

The 2015 scholar programs suggest to the preschool pupils “explore the space”. At the end of the first cycle, pupils must be able to locate themselves in space thanks to the experiment and to represent it. These two skills imply acquisition and recurrent use of topological and kinetic vocabulary, production of spatial representations (maps and models) and tracking in these representations. Some children’s picturebooks, often read in Pre-School, can be considered as “spatial products”. They suggest simple itineraries that require, for the reader, landmarks, comprehension of the configuration of the space in which the fiction takes place and comprehension of an itinerary. In this paper, we will report recent researches we led in a rural school of Indre-et-Loire with a 4-6 YO class. The protocol set up had the ambition to suggest a reading of some picturebooks, allowing to pupils manipulate “daily concepts” of structuration in space. The purpose was to demonstrate how pupils could use iconotextual language to tell a story, to relate an itinerary and so to train their “spatial memory”.

Many cultures have tales in which the main character wears a particular item of clothing or is invariably portrayed with a specific accessory. This character then embarks on an adventure-packed journey during which he or she must face a ferocious and sometimes deadly foe. Little Red Riding Hood is perhaps the fairytale that is the most deeply woven into the history of Western imagination, which is probably why it is still capable of inspiring continual and original rewritings and adaptations. Italy’s lively telling of this tale is epitomised in the visual re-writings of the classic version by the Brothers Grimm. This paper analyses the relationship between clothing and fashion in fairytales. A selection of the visual re-writings of the Grimms’ Little Red Riding Hood published in Italy over the last 20 years will be compared, focusing on the clothing and accessories created by illustrators to dress and distinguish the tale’s characters. Capes, hoods, earmuffs, cloaks, rucksacks, skirts, dresses, blouses, collars, shoes, boots, ribbons and yarns are just some of the items that comprise Little Red Riding Hood’s garb. By adopting this perspective, my essay posits answers to the following research questions: is there an established standard for dressing Little Red Riding Hood in Italian visual retellings of the Grimms’ tale? And what about the relationship between dressing the “little girl in red” and the developments of the tale?

As protesters filled Paris streets in May ‘68, across the Channel a quieter revolution was taking place. A radical reshaping of British education during the post-war era laid the way for a new era of progressive thinking about childhood, and turned attention to the question of children’s rights. Central to this was the notion of a right to read, and of the right of children to books which recognised the realities of their lives. Leila Berg – activist, author, editor – was at the forefront of this movement with her series of early reader Nippers. This paper examines Nippers in context, showing how the books brought together a long tradition of activist thought and encapsulated much of the spirit which animated ’68 more broadly.

Four albums will be discussed : Martine petite maman [Martine little mother] by Gilbert Delahaye and Marcel Marlier (Casterman, 1968), Histoire de Julie qui avait une ombre de garçon [The story of Julie the girl with a boy’s shadow] by Christian Bruel, Anne Bozellec and Anne Galland (Le Sourire qui mord, 1976), Salut poupée [Hi Dolly] by Adela Turin and Margherita Saccaro (Les éditions des femmes, 1978) and Mes années 70 [My 1970s] by Claudine Desmarteau (Panama, 2008). If I have brought together Martine, Julie, Marie and Claudine, the protagonists of these books, it is because these four little girls were all growing up at the same time, and they shared (or didn’t) ways of being and acting that relates to (or didn’t) the ideological context of the 1960s and 1970s, a time of great social change. By analysing selected images and significant sequences from each picturebook, I will seek to understand how the artists, commissioned by the publishing houses, challenged the conventions (or didn’t) of the relatively staid and conservative world of children’s picturebooks, in particular when representing little girls. My observations, without seeking to be exhaustive, will focus on the editing process, in the cinematographic sense of the term, which is to say on the rhythm generated by the turning of the pages. Thus, an examination of the repetitive scenes that make up the day of an obedient, model little girl or the more energetic rhythms that drive the more rebellious girls, used by the authors to provide their readers with insights into the very different lives of their heroines. Such aesthetic choices are by no means accidental, of course, and this is what I will be thinking about for this conference paper.

Favoured by poverty of images in Schoolbooks and by a constant reference of programmes to their presence in class, the Italian production of wall paintings increased progressively, so much to be not only a significant area of educational planning, but also a rich field of economic investment. This market has been managed for a long time by northern publishers, in particular by Vallardi (Milan) and, most of all, Paravia (Turin), the production of which covered all disciplines. The paper wants to investigate the issue on two fronts: on the one hand the different kind of wall paintings, thier main characteristics and the review of this material in the light of new didactics and of changed political climate. On the other, the mode in which market was shared, the relations between producers and the different strategy of promotion in teachers’ journals. Sample was the case of Paravia: thanks to a broad promotional strategy and to its relations with the Ministry, it acquired a large slice of market during the first half of XX Century.

Needs and motivations of children are complex and dynamic in long and short term, as are the needs of families in shared living spaces. Designing home environments which enable flexible use calls for better understanding of long-term and short-term needs. We explored the mapping of the psychological concepts of affordances and motivation to inform the design of spaces that might satisfy children's needs in a family home context. The paper is the result of a cooperation between architects and psychologists. Using a research by design method, a number of design ideas were developed which explored the use of space and objects to encourage transient ownership and interactions. Resulting ideas for the design of interior spaces were explored and discussed with the aim to provide a directly applicable framework for idea development in the context of spaces for children in a domestic setting.

Studies about children in the Global South often miss the wealth of possibilities of living a childhood and making sense of oneself as a child in places where adversities are rife. In territories inhabited by the lower classes in Brazil, like the ensemble of slums known as “favelas of Maré”, in Rio de Janeiro, the lack of infrastructure, the uncountable violations of human rights, economic hardships and other challenges lived by the great majority of children, have significant impacts on their development and subjectivities. However, these are territories that have histories of struggle, including both the “slow resistances” before military and police interventions to the capacity to preserve one’s livelihood in the midst of rivalries between armed drug factions and militia. In the present paper, we seek to analyze how being a child in the Maré favela implies living the street as contiguous to home. Notwithstanding the fact that streets are often considered a dangerous place where children should not be allowed by themselves, in Maré, children choose to be on the streets where they can exert more autonomy on their lives as they get to know and learn the local social codes and build up their knowledge about this public space. To consider the favela a city for children becomes relevant insofar as it defies the history behind the numbers of children killed by “stray bullets” which, for many, consists but a cold statistic of violence in some part of Rio de Janeiro.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse a picturebook – A Cidade [The City], by Inês Fonseca Santos and Beatriz Bagulho – that deals with a symbolic city since it refers to a single building: a cultural centre in the heart of Lisbon. Aimed at promoting the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) [Cultural Centre of Belém] and its cultural activities among young readers, this picturebook depicts the building and its “inhabitants” as a special city, “a city inside a city”, including its history (and anecdotes) and special protagonists. The metaphor used throughout the picturebook reinforces the idea of space cohesion and identity, a sort of a unique ecosystem where art and people can be together. Combining facts and fiction, this picturebook is also distinguished by the way it promotes the idea of an urban setting as a child-friendly space, an uncommon idea in Portuguese children’s literature.