Adventure & Search-and-Find

Adventure & Search-and-Find is the active shelf at Wild Time Comics & Stories in Attleboro, Massachusetts: personalized books that ask a child to do something on the page rather than sit still through it.

The search-and-find titles hide objects across illustrated scenes — a farm, a workshop, several different worlds — and name the child on every spread, so they are hunting for themselves as well as for the objects. The adventure titles hand over a job instead: a quest through enchanted lands, a race won on quick wits rather than speed, a meadow that has lost its sparkle and needs somebody to sort it out.

Both halves are really buying attention. A page with a task on it gets a second look, and a second look is how a reading habit starts. They also survive repetition better than a plot does, because the finding is never quite finished and the child already knows how the story ends.

Adventure & Search-and-Find suits the age when sitting quietly through a book is simply not on offer.