ContentsIntroduction: Novelty Value1. The Three Rs: Reading, Ripping, Reconstructing2. Against the Wall: Stories, Spaces, and the Children’s Panorama3. The Movable Book in 3-D4. Ernest Nister Christopher Columbus: The Tale of a Dissolving-View Book5. Going through the Motions: Lothar Meggendorfer and the Mechanical Book Conclusion: Novelty Book HistoryAcknowledgmentsNotes Index

"With impressive archival work, considerable historical contextualization, and an admirable knack for close reading, Hannah Field deftly traces how children did, and didn’t, read texts that demanded engagement from the eye, the hand, and the mind. Playing with the Book offers a powerful theory of embodied reading that emerges from a respectful, sustained engagement with these remarkable books and the children who read them."—Anna Mae Duane, editor of The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities"We may be underestimating the movable text’s place in the Victorian imagination. In this persuasive and lively study, Hannah Field reveals how nineteenth-century audiences played with and perceived toy theatres, panoramas, and mechanical books and describes modernity’s ferment in these powerfully nostalgic, ephemeral technologies. Movable novelties provided unique and engaging sensory experiences in the domestic space and in exhibition halls, and Field opens a critical window onto these interactive texts."—Nathalie op de Beeck, author of Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity  "Such books were made to be handled and used as much as read, and as such, they offer insight into the vexing question of children's agency as readers, especially when one looks at, as Field does, physical traces—ripping, scribbling, coloring—left behind by child readers."—CHOICE"Field makes a significant contribution to what seems a niche topic, not least in her argument that it shouldn't be niche at all. At a moment when the focus of book history has shifted towards embodied reading and "doing things with books", such  books—often bearing the traces of clumsy little hands—have a new kind of resonance."—Times Literary Supplement"A well-written, thought-provoking, and timely book."—Barnboken"Close attention to embodied engagement and agency is a strength of Field’s Playing with the Book."—Victorian Studies "A valuable addition to graduate and undergraduate-level courses in children’s literature, book history, and Victorian studies... Playing with the Book teaches readers that we might pave the future of children’s literature by looking back into the past innovations and complications of movable books."—ImageText "Field provides insightful readings and thoughtful considerations of novelty and movable books."—Children’s Literature Association Quarterly