ABSTRACT
The term 'wimmelbook' is an English adaptation of the German Wimmelbuch, which has become a household name for a specific type of non-directive wordless picturebook. The idea of 'teeming' refers to the visual copiousness of the images in a wimmelbook. Wimmelbooks are related to several other types of picturebooks that stimulate children's visual literacy and empower them to 'read' contents before they actually can decode written words. The unbroken popularity of wimmelbooks is based on the numerous reading approaches they support and the manifold responses they can evoke among their readers. A number of authors have varied the spatial structure of wimmelbooks regarding their perspective construction, the connections between the doublespreads, and even their material design. Since Josh Cochran's New York focuses on the local identity of one specific city, it represents even another trend: geographic wimmelbooks claim to depict not arbitrary fictitious landscapes, but real locations.
