by Patricia Crain

About Patricia Crain

Patricia Crain is Professor of English at New York University and the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000) and Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Nineteenth-Century Childhood (2016). Her recent work explores the emergence of child readers as galvanizing cultural and literary figures in the nineteenth century, the genealogy of the key cultural concept of literacy in the late nineteenth century, and the related (historical and current) moral panics concerning children and reading.

Book

book Keywords for Children's Literature

Rooted in old Germanic languages, book is a near relative of beech because of “the practice among Germanic peoples of scratching runes onto strips of wood” or, as others speculate, because of “the use of wooden writing tablets” (OED). Romance languages’ liber, which English calls on for library, derives similarly from a word for bark (OED) or leaf (Partridge 1979), while biblio (for Bible and -graphy, -phile, and -mania) draws from a word for papyrus. As with many ancient words, especially words about words, the woodsy etymology of book evokes myth and ritual, investing materiality with magic. Many children’s books may seem to distill the essence of bookness, opening—like fairy tales or Max’s leafy bedroom in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963)—onto woods and forests. But the long-lived allure of the children’s book, as of the book itself, has many roots and branches owing to the book’s many ways of making meaning: as a format, as a trope, as a material artifact, as a commodity.