The Books That Sing

Abstract

This paper is an examination of phonograph records marketed to children in the first decades of the phonograph industry and the cultural discourses that surrounded them. I focus on the first book and record hybrid marketed to children: a pioneering instance of cross-media synergy between the book publishing and record industries. The first edition of the “Bubble Books” was released in 1917, and indicates the design of home media texts that were considered to be “good for children,” as well as some of the anxieties that surrounded the arrival of such products into the home. The marketing of “the books that sing” provides a rich case study in the early implementation of techniques for marketing children's media that would become widespread later in the twentieth century. Advertising materials for Bubble Books reveal a lost phase in the development of the marketing of children's media products to parents and children. Ultimately, this essay is concerned not only with adding the phonograph industry to historical accounts of children's media, and with documenting early strategies for marketing children's media products, but also with identifying aspects of that marketing that allowed these pioneering instances of home media products for children to be woven into the fabric of everyday American family life.