What is a picturebook?

Opal Dunn , whose work in promoting the use of authentic children's literature in ELT is second to none, refers to picture books as 'realbooks' or 'real picturebooks'.  Opal uses this term to differentiate between reading scheme books and picture books.  Liz Waterland, who coined the term 'real books' became increasingly frustrated with the philosophical arguments she encountered about what being 'real' actually meant (similar arguments were had in discussions around using 'real books' in ELT) and I recently came across a chapter she wrote where she uses the terms 'free range' and 'battery' books!  I like the idea of picture books being 'free range'!

Gail Ellis and Jean Brewster of the 'Tell it again!' Longman resource book call picturebooks 'storybooks'.   And indeed all the picture book titles in their publication are picture storybooks.  But picturebooks are not just stories.  Picturebooks are very diverse in form – they include big books and little books, books in prose and books in verse, fiction and non-fiction, ABC books and counting books, board books and cloth books, pop up books, and books with moving parts … and there are picturebooks with no words!  They are so diverse that they have baffled academics in their search for a single definition.

So how does a picturebook differ from other illustrated literature? The American Caldecott Awards describe a picturebook as having a 'collective unity of story-line, theme, or concept, developed through the series of pictures of which the book is comprised.' Pictures and words are partners in picture books - codes that can both be read. What is so exciting about these two codes, the pictures and the words, is that they don't always tell the same story. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.  

Metaphors for how pictures and words inter-animate abound in the literature about picturebooks:

• A theatrical metaphor: they have been called a double-act;
• A musical metaphor: they are like a duet;
• They have been compared to textiles: interweaving to create the perfect cloth;
• To dancing a tango …  for you need two to Tango!
• By both influencing / being influenced by one another they have been referred to as an ecosystem;
• And finally the visual and the verbal texts in picture books are thought to work together in synergy - text and picture together produce a whole that is greater together than the sum of the individual parts.

But picturebooks are not just the inter-animation of pictures and words, there's a third element, design. Children’s publishing cleverly uses illustrators, authors, editors and book designers to ensure all the different parts of a book - front and back covers, dust jackets, endpapers, half-title and title pages, copyright and dedication pages - are brought together with the pictures and the words to produce a unified end product, the picture book as object.

So, what is a picture book? Barbara Bader's definition is the one I like the best, and that's why I've chosen it for this blog.  It's there at the top, permanently, to remind us!

“A picturebook is text, illustrations, total design; an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historic document; and foremost, an experience for a child.  As an art form it hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning page.”  (Barbara Bader 1976:1)

A note on the spelling!  In the world of children's literature the spelling of 'picturebook' has come under great discussion.  Is it two words, 'picture book'? Is it hyphened,  'picture-book'? Or is it a compound noun, 'picturebook'? The spell check on my computer accepts only the first option, but you'll find 'picturebook' as a compound noun being used more and more, which according to David Lewis 'reflects the compound nature of the artefact'.  

• Barbara Bader 1976 American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to The Beast Within. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. 
• Gail Ellis & Jean Brewster (2002) Tell it again! The new storytelling handbook for primary teachers. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited 
• Liz Waterland 1992 'Ranging Freely.  The why and the what of Real Books' in Styles, M, Bearne, E. & Watson, V. After Alice. London: Cassell
• David Lewis 2001 Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing text.  London: Routledge