ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the first soundtracked books, an early-twentieth-century series from Harper-Columbia marketed as “Bubble Books.” Patented in 1917, the hardbound children’s series slotted miniature, 78rpm records inside specially pocketed pages. The stories themselves feature a lonely, modern child in possession of a bubble pipe, the magic powers of which allow him to conjure well-known Mother Goose characters for companionship and edification. The interleaved records, meanwhile, offer contemporary recordings of traditional nursery songs. The enormously popular series was uniquely engaging, requiring the audience to divide its activity between readtime (spent visually accessing the printed text) and runtime (spent aurally accessing the musical recordings). As a paradigmatic example of schizotemporal media, Bubble Books' complicated relationship with time filters into the content itself. Throughout the series, the storylines carefully navigate an anxious present, offering the promise of a more perfect future by attempting to reanimate the past. While Harper-Columbia's innovative marketing campaigns prefigured everything from midcentury children’s television to the many interactive elements of the Disney empire, the series itself – with a concerted appeal to the past and future alike – set the tone for a century of schizotemporal media.
