Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture by Meredith A. Bak (review)

Nineteenth-century optical toys have enjoyed a comfortable afterlife in archives, museums, and early cinema textbooks, recognized as historical predecessors of or footnotes to the eventual emergence of the motion picture industry. Devices like the zoetrope, the pop-up book, and the kaleidoscope are just some of the early interactive toys whose histories are the subject of Meredith Bak's new book Playful Visions. During the first half of the 1800s, the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope, and the zoetrope were popular "rational recreation" devices that would spin or rotate pictures on paper cards to create composite images or the illusion of movement. The visual habits encouraged by the use of these toys would be standardized and pedagogically institutionalized by the latter half of the century with the emergence of interactive toy books, the kaleidoscope, and the stereoscope. While these early technologies contributed in important ways to the visual paradigms and expectations that would eventually form the foundation of the filmgoing experience, Bak challenges the idea that nineteenth-century optical devices were simply precinematic ephemera, minor players in a linear trajectory that culminated in the invention of motion pictures. Rather, Bak conceives of these toys as dynamic media technologies through which perceptual habits and competencies were tried and honed. Playful Visions understands these technologies as early examples of so-called "new media," and children as the "central figures around whom new media culture revolved" well over a century ago (11). Thoughtfully engaging with these neglected early technologies, Bak explores how the circulation of optical toys in England and the United States during this period of rapid industrial development shaped conceptions of children as media users and play as children's work.

Playful Visions brings together the fields of media archaeology and childhood studies, uncovering critical affinities between these two seemingly distinct intellectual projects. The long-standing philosophical challenge within childhood studies has been in parsing out the false dichotomy between the physical, real child and the culturally constructed, imaginary child, when, of course, "actual children's lives are profoundly shaped by powerful (often contradictory) cultural narratives of childhood" (3). By a similar token, media archaeology constructs material histories of neglected or forgotten technologies by way of cultural imaginings or immaterial, discursive contexts. Bak thus demonstrates how the methods of media archaeology are useful in addressing the questions and challenges of childhood media studies. Playful Visions illuminates these "forgotten media and the historical children who played with them" (4) by connecting scraps and ephemera of early media culture (like children's magazine cut-outs for crafting homemade thaumatropes) with contemporaneous discourses on childhood leisure and education, providing a kaleidoscopic array of archival examples that highlight a well-established set of connections between childhood and media culture.

The range of contexts from which the book's objects are extracted speaks to the complex and uneven histories of early optical media. Bak conducted much of her research in the film archives of institutions such as Turin's National Cinema Museum, Padua's Museum of Precinema, the University of Exeter's Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, but she also did a considerable amount of research at the Strong National Museum of Play (also in Rochester), Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the V&A Museum of Childhood in London, with shorter forays into other archives and private collections. Each of the book's six chapters, excluding its introduction and conclusion, begins by narrativizing Bak's archival experiences, foregrounding her physical interactions with the optical technologies. Drawing from a bevy of examples of "juvenile recreation literature," like T.W. Erles's Children's Toys and Some Elementary Lessons in General Knowledge Which They Teach (1877) and Richard and Maria Edgeworth's Practical Education (1798), along with para-literary examples such as instructional materials and sales guides for travelling sales agents, Bak examines the multitudinous...