About this Exhibit
This online exhibit was created to celebrate and showcase the paratextual elements that can be found within the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. This library features many books that show signs of personal use by children, something that has always been a driving force behind building this collection. These signs of personal use, as well as other elements, are paratexts and can tell us much about who the book belonged to before and reader culture on a whole.
The term “paratext” refers to anything that is within a book that is outside of the actual text. This may include epigraphs, inscriptions, marginalia, illustrations, book plates, and other marks of provenance. These elements make a text completely unique and allow us to imagine just who might have been using the book before us and what they were like.