Bak, M. A. (2020). Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Review by Eva Van de Wiele

Abstract

Optical devices and their domestic variants are housed in exhibition venues ranging from museums of cinema (such as the National Museum of Cinema in Turin) to toy museums (such as the Spielzeugmuseum in Nuremberg). My visit to that German toy museum this summer, while spending a research stay at the International Children’s Library in Munich, coincided with the reading of Meredith Bak’s Playful Visions. Her book reveals how optical toys fundamentally impacted the evolution of material culture for children and offers fruitful ground for research beyond (pre)cinema studies. She argues for scholarly attention to children in media studies, as they ‘became central figures around whom new media culture revolved’ (Bak, 2020, p. 11).