Movable Books

 

Movable books -- science at work and play

by Gillian O'Reilly

The term "movable books" (including lift-the-flap, pull the tab and pop-up books) evokes images of diverting children's books or grand paper constructions of Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter or Star Wars scenes. The roots of these books, however, lie in astronomy and medicine and their pedigree is centuries old.

We can look back nearly 900 years to the first known lift-the-flap manuscript, the Liber Floridus (1121), which shows the orbits of the planets.

Later books included anatomy texts where the lift-the-flap function was ideal for showing the exterior and then interior of organs such as the heart; click on the link to see this 1662 example from Descartes' De homine figures.

Gradually, the movable book format moved into the world of juvenile literature, appearing in the mid-18^th century. Some were very simple lift-the-flap operations, but the format grew to include movable wheels, pull-string or pull-tab devices and eventually the pop-up book where the simple act of turning of the page engineers a 3D construction ranging from simple to magnificently complex.

These early forms of interactive materials were designed to engage young readers in the text, whether for amusement or instruction -- or as Spring projecting figures, or, Dean's new model book: The farmer & his family (1865) notes, "by carefully raising the projecting parts of the pictures, the effect will be improved." Topics for juvenile movable books ranged widely from fairy tales, Bible stories, domestic life, and historical events.

Today, movable books again bring you science in wonderfully intricate pop-ups and lift-the-flap publication like Bugs by paper engineer George McGavin.

The world-renowned historical children's book collection at the Osborne Collection in the Lillian H. Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library contains works by many noted paper engineers, including the six-foot, life-sized Dimensional Man -- as the catalogue summary says, "just lift the left pectoral muscle to see the thorax or turn the large intestine anti-clockwise to reveal the abdomen!"

Note: The Osborne Collection www.torontopubliclibrary.ca\osborne\ offers excellent opportunities to explore science books for children through the centuries. It is housed in the Lillian H. Smith Branch, along with the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy.

Gillian O'Reilly

Science, Traditional Knowledge, and Beautiful Picture books

Science, Traditional Knowledge, and Beautiful Picture Books

by Gillian O'Reilly

Celebrate National Aboriginal Day (June21, 2020) and science by exploring these beautiful picture books.

For toddlers and pre-schoolers, Indigenous artist Roy Henry Vickers and his co-author Robert Budd have created gorgeous board books One Eagle Soaring and Sockeye Silver, Saltchuck Blue (Harbour Publishing). Here's a link to the listing for One Eagle Soaring at Harbour Publishing.

These books introduce little ones to numbers and colours and the landscape, flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest. Just out this month is the next book in the series Raven Squawk, Orca Squeak, looking at -- you guessed it -- the sounds animals make. Click here for a link to learn more about this book.

For slightly older children, we turn from animals to plants with A Day with Yayah (Tradewind Books), written by Nicola I. Campbell and illustrated by Julie Flett, both award-winning creators. In BC’s Nicola Valley, a grandmother (Yayah) shares her extensive knowledge of the natural world with her grandchildren, and encourages them to use the Nłeʔkepmxcin words for the plants they are collecting. Here's a link to find this book at Tradewind.

Two more excellent depictions of traditional knowledge being shared through generations can be found in A Walk on the Tundra and A Walk on the Shore. (Here's a link to where these books were discussed in a previous blog post on Sci/Why along with other books from publisher Inhabit Media).

Enjoy these books on National Aboriginal Day and all year around. Happy reading!

Gillian O’Reilly is the former editor of Canadian Children’s Book News and the co-author (with Cora Lee) of The Great Number Rumble: A Story of Math in Surprising Places.

Epidemics, Smallpox, and William Osler

By Gillian O'Reilly

These days, our minds are on epidemics (the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time) and pandemics (disease epidemics that have spread across large regions or worldwide).
 
One of my current projects is a book about the brilliant Canadian diagnostician and medical
educator Dr. William (Willie) Osler. Born in 1849 when people still thought diseases were
caused by bad air, Osler lived through the huge changes brought about by the discovery of
germs. There are several stories of his encounters with smallpox during his career.

Photo of William Osler from 1881 used with permission

of the Osler Library for the History of Medicine

In the nineteenth century, smallpox was a terrifying disease, often fatal. Survivors were left with bad scarring or blindness. Symptoms were fever, a rash, and characteristic pustules all over the body. Once diagnosed, smallpox patients had to be quickly isolated from other patients in a separate ward or hospital.
 
Vaccinations, successfully tested in 1796, had replaced variolation (an earlier form of inoculation used in Asia and Africa for centuries). Over the nineteenth century, widespread vaccination, sometimes mandated by law, had reduced the number of infections and deaths, but there were still regular outbreaks where vaccination rates were low.

In the spring of 1872 after his final year of medical school, Willie worked briefly at a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. There he encountered a rare case of smallpox and drove the dying patient to mayor’s home to force the authorities to provide proper isolated accommodation for the man.
 

Quarantine poster image used with permission 

of the Osler Library for the History of Medicine

 
Montreal was one part of Canada where vaccination rates were low. Willie was teaching at McGill University during the smallpox epidemic of 1875-1876 and he took time to work in Montreal’s smallpox hospital, earning $600. Although he had been vaccinated (like all his siblings), he caught a mild case of the disease.
 
In those days, medical students learned mostly from lectures, rarely seeing patients or working in a lab. One of Willie’s innovations as a teacher was to make sure that his students had microscopes, so they could see and understand the diseases they were studying. The $600 he earned went to pay for microscopes.
 
Willie was one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. When it opened in the fall of 1893, he at last had the medical school he wanted – a place where learning, hospital work and research were intertwined and where students could learn by doing. Willie led a weekly general clinic at the hospital, where he and students would see patients. 

By then, some diseases had become rare enough that many doctors and students had trouble diagnosing them. One resident proudly displayed what he thought was an interesting case of chicken pox to Osler and 30 or 40 students and doctors. When he threw back the sheet, a horrified Willie exclaimed, “My God, Futcher, don’t you know smallpox when you see it?” The patient was quickly isolated, the ward quarantined for six weeks and the students and staff hurriedly vaccinated.

In 1980, smallpox became the only human disease to be declared eradicated, thanks to a worldwide vaccination program in the 20th century.

More on William Osler and the history of medicine can be found at The Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill  https://www.mcgill.ca/library/branches/osler

The Osler Library Instagram page at https://www.instagram.com/oslerlibrary/  has a good drawing of emergency smallpox vaccinations being performed on American-bound trains from Montreal.

The Mistaken Monolith of Math

By Gillian O'Reilly

“I don’t like math.”...“I’m not good at math.”...“Math is hard.”

Beautiful math:
a Moebius strip

In light of the current discussions around falling math scores in Ontario, I am reminded of how much these comments from kids - and, even more so, from adults - drive me crazy!

It’s not because I think everyone should like math or be good at it. It’s because the speakers are treating math as one huge monolithic subject instead of many fascinatingly interconnected strands.

Contrast this with our attitude to English literature. If a student loved short stories and poetry but was left unmoved by plays, would we say that she/he didn’t like English? No. If a winner of the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize was incapable of writing a science fiction novel, would we say they were “not good” at English? Hardly. But we allow ourselves to think we aren’t good at math or don’t like it if we aren’t accomplished at every aspect.

This gorgeous image is math - an algebraic fractal called a Mandelbrot set.
A fractal is a mathematically constructed pattern of shapes that are miniature
 versions of the whole shape and that echo themselves endlessly. Algebraic fractals,
like this Mandelbrot set, may look wild but are still symmetrical at heart.
Image credit: Wolfgang Beyer [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0],
via Wikimedia Commons

I used to be as guilty of this as anyone. Going through school, I had very different impressions of my ability in math, depending on what subjects we were learning. I eventually discovered that my lack of enthusiasm for division didn’t arise from missing 40 days of school in Grade 4. In fact, it is not uncommon to find addition and multiplication easier than subtraction and division.

I loved math the years I encountered geometry (nothing like encountering math with letters to make a bookworm like the subject) and algebra (reducing an unknown to one possible answer intrigues a mystery lover). Fortunately, while other years weren’t so positive, I managed to retain a fondness for the weird, the cool and the paradoxical in math.

When Cora Lee and I wrote The Great Number Rumble: A Story of Math in Surprising Places (Annick Press), we both wanted young readers to find that same pleasure. It didn’t matter whether they found it in fractals or Fibonacci numbers, topology or tessellations, or in the semi-prime numbers which I find inexplicably cool. All that mattered was that they found some part of mathematics to engage them.

If they can do that and can stop seeing math as one big indivisible mass, students - and maybe even adults - can start being able to say, “I like math,” “I’m pretty good at most of it,” or  “This is a bit hard, but it is really fun.”

Arctic Publisher Shares Northern Voices, Traditional Knowledge

By Gillian O'Reilly

Looking for engaging, appealing and informative science-themed and technology-themed books that incorporate traditional knowledge? Look no further than Inhabit Media.

Inhabit Media, an Inuit-owned publishing house based in Iqaluit and Toronto, aims to “promote and preserve the stories, knowledge and talent of northern Canada.” The company publishes a wide range of books for adults and kids, plus two magazines: Kaakuluk: Nunavut’s Discovery Magazine for Kids and Pivut: The Magazine for Nunavut Youth.

With an author list that includes established and emerging Northern writers and elders, as well as knowledgeable Southerners, Inhabit offers readers a rich variety -- from board books on Inuit tools and clothes to informational picture books to YA novels, historical and contemporary. Publishing in English, French, Inuktitut and sometimes Inuinnaqtun, Inhabit works to ensure that its books are accessible to both Northern and Southern readers.

A recent success for the company has been the Animals Illustrated series for readers aged 4 to 6. Each book is a lively mix of animals facts and first-hand accounts from authors who live in the Arctic, accompanied by meticulous and appealing illustrations. There are now four books in the series, covering polar bears, narwhals, muskox and walruses. A fifth book, on bowhead whales, is coming this fall.

One of my personal favourites in Inhabit’s list is A Children’s Guide to Arctic Birds (2014), written by Mia Pelletier and illustrated by Danny Christopher (for ages 4 to 6). Informative, accurate and with gorgeous illustrations, the book looks at 12 birds that make the Arctic their permanent or seasonal home.

Another favourite is A Walk on the Tundra (2011) written by Anna Ziegler and Rebecca Hainnu and illustrated by Qin Leng (for ages 6 to 8). This is a picture book story that features a warm intergenerational relationship while incorporating a great deal of traditional knowledge.

Innuujaq reluctantly accompanies her grandmother on a walk to pick Arctic plants. Through it, she learns a few things about her grandmother and much about tasty, nourishing and medicinal plants. Included at the end are scientific descriptions of the plants, photographs and a glossary of Inuktitut words and phrases.

More recently, Ziegler, Hainnu and Leng collaborated on A Walk on the Shoreline (2015).

Discover your own favourites among Inhabit’s books at www.inhabitmedia.com!

I Blame Dr. Suzuki, or, Why I Write about Science

By Gillian O'Reilly

How did a history and art history graduate end up writing about science? I blame it on Dr. David Suzuki. Specifically, I blame it on a 30-year-old episode of the radio program Quirks and Quarks, which Suzuki hosted, and on a talk he gave to a group of booksellers some 25 years ago. In both cases, the stories he told lodged themselves in a corner of my mind and slowly, slowly pushed science to the forefront of my interests.

The Quirks and Quarks episode was a presentation of ordinary citizens grappling with a new aspect of science in an extraordinarily thoughtful way. It showed a community somewhere in New England faced with a proposal for a laboratory examining recombinant DNA. Back then, for the ordinary layperson, recombinant DNA was the stuff of science fiction or nightmares or both. As I recall, Quirks and Quarks broadcast parts of the public hearings over at least two episodes, devoting hours to the topic with very little editorial comment. We simply heard ordinary people informing themselves, working through questions and coming up with their conclusions. The lab was allowed.

When David Suzuki spoke to the booksellers a few years later, he began by discussing the all-too-common idea that science doesn’t have anything to do with one’s day-to-day life. Intellectually, I agreed with Suzuki that this idea was wrong, but, frankly, science didn’t seem to have much to do with my day-to-day life either.

Suzuki pointed out that, when he was a child, he wasn’t allowed to go to the movies or the swimming pool because of polio scares. As someone who had measles before there was a vaccine and who had seen the results of childhood polio in 1980s Africa, his statement hit home for me. He detailed other ways that science had changed his and everyone’s lives, but what I remember was the vaccines – the very ordinary way that children’s lives have been changed in ways today’s kids can scarcely imagine.

Over the years, I have recalled and reflected on the stories Suzuki told, as I gradually became more interested in writing about STEM topics. These two episodes showed both the ways in which ordinary people’s lives can be affected by science and the way ordinary laypeople can grasp and make intelligent decisions about science.

So I write about STEM subjects, not just for the budding scientist, but for the kids who will grow up to be historians or artists or school principals or lawmakers – all of whom will need to understand and make intelligent decisions about the wonderful science around us.

Gillian O’Reilly is the co-author with Cora Lee of The Great Number Rumble, Revised and Updated: A Story of Math in Surprising Places (Annick Press, 2016), illustrated by Lil Crump.