Touch and Feel Puppy

A typical DK presentation, consisting of appealing photographs of various puppies and their playthings, arranged on a white ground.

The simple text invites us to feel a fluffy tummy, silky ear, woolly slipper, rubber ball and leathery nose, all of which are represented by appropriate(ish) materials inserted into holes in the photos.

Rod Campbell’s I won’t bite uses this idea successfully – his felt-pen illustrations more easily accommodating insertions. Here the effect is odd at best – and grotesque at worst; the cover, with fake fur protruding through a hole as though part of a puppy’s fluffy back, turns to expose more of the same fur, now the chest of the next dog, for all the world like a furry bib.

Some of the materials used give an oddly two-dimensional effect, rendering a ball flat and a puppy’s nose strangely sunken. In addition, obviously disparate images put together on a page do not automatically make a coherent illustration, and airbrushed-in shadows give the impression that some of the dogs are half-floating.

While my toddler quickly learned to run her hands over the pages to locate the different textures, little else attracted her attention. The DK format, effective in some contexts, seems badly used here.