As kids, long before we learnt how to sound things out and embarked on the nightly reader programs of primary school, there were picture books. With our illiteracy and fleeting attention spans in mind, the images in these books were often more comprehensive and important than the text itself.

The following picture books are not of the childhood variety and are distinct in that the pictures, photos and graphics used are incorporated within the text and not independent of it, having both playful and explosive effects.

In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, nine-year-old Oskar struggles with a particularly distressing secret – he was the only one home when his father called from the collapsing World Trade Center on September 11.  Paralysed by confusion and fear – he didn’t pick up the phone, instead letting his father’s pleas on the family answering machine go unanswered.  Consequently, he becomes fixated with a key he finds hidden in his late father’s wardrobe and determined to find which of the 162 million locks in New York it opens. Confused, distraught and grieving, Oskar often displays compulsive and autistic tendencies, his minds eye effectively conveyed through the sporadic inclusion of abstract photographs, letters, handwritten notes and doodles.  The book will have you squinting to make out some of the smaller text and reading the handwritten dialogue scrawled by a character that can no longer speak. The main challenge of this book is resisting the temptation of flipping through the pictures ahead of the text, as some of the most heartbreaking moments of the book are delivered pictorially.

You don’t have to be a media student to appreciate the pure spectacle of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage – An Inventory of Effects.  In isolation, the text of McLuhan’s work seems both alarmist and hilarious as he peddles his ideas on technological determinism.  ‘The television generation is a grim bunch,’ McLuhan writes in 1967, ‘It is much more serious than children of any other period – where they were frivolous, more whimsical. The television child is more earnest, more dedicated.’  But the adventurous design and typographic experimentation by Quentin Fiore have the effect of proving McLuhan’s ultimate aim.  You’ll get lost in the barrage of bold images, optical illusions, extreme close-ups of eyes and toe-nails, of dancing tribes in far off lands and find yourself turning the book upside down and squinting at miniscule fonts on close to blank pages. And by the end of this book that feels more like an experience, his claim that we are shaped ‘more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than the content of the communication’ no longer seems completely ridiculous.

In contrast, The Little Prince, a novella written by French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery is gentler in its approach but equally memorable.  Written primarily in the first person, Saint-Exupery is apologetic when it comes to his simple hand drawn cartoons of the Little Prince he encounters and the book opens with a recreation of one of his first drawings – a boa constrictor that has just eaten an elephant – which he complains is always mistaken for a picture of the hat.  Penned as a children’s book, the allegories The Little Prince are easily more appreciated by the figures obsessed ‘grown ups’ that the author frequently mocks.  Saint-Exupery draws caricatures of the individuals the Little Prince comes across in his intergalactic travels – the literally named King, Conceited Man and Drunkard but the illustrated stories of the rose and the fox are most rewarding, for their insights on friendship, love, expectations and the importance of consistency.  Despite the regular inclusion of his drawings, often the text itself creates beautiful imagery. Saint-Exupery doesn’t attempt to depict the 143 sunsets that the Little Prince watches in one day, a stunning and heartbreaking measure of his overwhelming sadness.

Odd-ones-out – but still worth a look

Apples for Jam – Tessa Kiros

In a cookbook genre overpopulated by celebrity chefs and minimal food styling (think Bill Granger and white everything, bless him), Apples for Jam is a delightful exception and easily a bedtime book for the food obsessed.  Recipes are based on comfort foods and childhood memories and its pages are fittingly unrestrained in design and decoration.  Bright and cluttered photos of crayons and stuffed mice toys site alongside recipes which are endearingly organised in the colours of the rainbow.  Kids doodles drawn in Texta frame most pages and best of the all – the food itself appears lifelike. Meaning honey cakes are lopsided and lasagne is served in big messy slabs, so the reader will not be intimidated by their lack of culinary skills or mis-matching crockery.

Oh the Places You Will Go – Dr Seuss

If you really must read a traditional picture book – make it a Dr Seuss.  You’ll probably find that you’ll appreciate the meaning of the stories in your old age and still be entertained by his distinctive creatures. Creatures that have yet to be done justice in Hollywood film adaptations.  Oh the Places You Will Go is particularly re-assuring and insightful, a book that you’ll want to keep close by for re-reading or pass on to a friend for it’s, well friendly advice.  ‘Congratulations!’ is its cheery opener, ‘Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re Off and away!’  But unlike idealistic the reach-for-the-stars mentality they drill into you at high-school, Dr Seuss also balances his positive enthusiasm with some sage advice. Delivered in rhyme, no less. ‘I’m sorry to say so, but sadly, it’s true, and Hang-ups can happen to you. You can get all hung up, in a prickley-ly perch, And your gang will fly on, You’ll be left in a Lurch.’

And for the very brave – there’s Laurence Sterne’s nine volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which first appeared in 1759.  Published over the next ten years, it is credited as one of the first and greatest comic novels in the English language.

Cover image taken from The Medium is the Massage, M. McLuhan & Q. Fiore, The Penguin Press, 1967.