Tara Books to Art1st, interactive books for children are increasingly engaging with form

In A Book is a Bee (Tulika Books), Lavanya Karthik writes:

“A Book is a Bee,

Buzzing in your head,

With things to say.

A Book is a Tree,

With branches to climb,

To see the world around.”

Much has been written about the metaphorical forms a book takes: they are doors, windows, and yes, even bees. But how has the physical form of the book been imagined? The earliest books with elements that could be manipulated were created for scholars, such as Astronomicum Caesareum (Imperial Astronomy, 1540) or Humphry Repton’s Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1794). But today, they have found their way to readers of all ages.

In Children’s Books: An Indian Story, edited by Shailaja Menon and Sandhya Rao (Eklavya), which came out a few months ago, V. Geetha and Divya Vijaykumar of Tara Books write how the publishing house sought to creatively ‘disrupt’ normal reading practices in the country by ‘remaking the book form, changing the simple act of turning the page into a playful exercise that allows children to read meaning through engagement with the form’.

Avinash Veeraraghavan, a Bengaluru-based artist has been collecting interactive books for over a decade. I asked him what it was that drew him to the work of Hervé Tullet and Takahiro Kurashima. “A sense of play,” he responded. His answer made me contemplate why I was drawn to these books. I realised it was because they force me to slow down and become more intentional in the way I interact with each page. I remember reading Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell to my children when they were younger and how each flap drew the reading experience out. Their delight at discovering what lay beneath didn’t diminish even after multiple readings.

Seedlings hiding in pages

Internationally, interactive books have been a publishing mainstay, but in India, few produce them, perhaps due to the costs involved. While Tulika Books and Pratham Books have had some forays into the space, it is Tara Books and recently Art1st, who have experimented the most.

Tara Books’ first designer Rathna Ramananathan would apparently quip: “The book, as we know it, should and must change.” From their first scroll book, Hensparrow Turns Purple published in 1998, to one of my personal favourites, An Indian Beach: By Day and Night by Joëlle Jolivet, Tara has been contemplating the form of the book.

The idea for their most recent interactive work, Seed, by Gita Wolf and brothers Tushar and Mayur Vayeda, took root during the COVID-19 lockdown, when Wolf found herself tending to a small patch of land on a farm outside Puducherry. The narrative is in the form of four short essays each with its own unique paper form that captures an aspect of the seed: from a pop-up to leporello (long accordion folds) to a booklet to a massive foldout.

“Watching plants grow, I thought of a narrative that would call attention to the seed as straddling the realms of both nature and culture,” she shares. The meditative essays are accompanied by the Vayeda brothers’ delicate, intricate Warli art. Wolf knew from the start she wanted them to illustrate the book given their living knowledge of plants and trees and deep interest in the environment.

Paper wheels and accordions

Art1st’s interactive books introduce young readers to the lives and work of Indian artists such as Meera Mukherjee, Ganesh Pyne, Abanindranath Tagore, and Jamini Roy. Shambhavi Thakur, a designer with the publishing house, shares that all choices regarding the shape and form of each book are made to do justice to the story of the artist in a way that will speak to a child. “Whatever elements the book needs to have — emotionally and thematically, like tension, play, empathy, and drama — are translated into forms such as texture, interactivity, and materials.”

In Abanindranath’s House of Stories by Likla and Eva, small windows cut into the pages provide readers a glimpse into Tagore’s home at #5 Jorasanko, and the painter’s inner world and art. While in Ganesh Pyne’s Twilight Dreams by Vaishali Shroff and Priya Kuriyan, pop-ups and accordion folds add a feeling of expansiveness to the illustrative spreads, giving readers a sense of the breath of Pyne’s creativity.

While Art1st’s books are primarily intended for younger readers and make their way to libraries, schools and NGOs across the country, Tara sees their books as intended for readers of all ages. “We are often bemused to see adults gushing over children’s books, and young readers leafing through a book on indigenous art,” shares Vijaykumar.

Whether one is four or 40, we can all benefit from more play, intentionality and slowing down in our lives. And if we can find them in the spinning of an artful paper wheel, I can think of nothing better.

The writer is a children’s book author and columnist based in Bengaluru.