By Neil Ardley
The photo-packed Eyewitness tour of instruments from all over the world, laid out for browsing rather than reading straight through.
This is the classic DK Eyewitness treatment pointed at music: big pages, crisp photographs on white, and short blocks of text you can read in any order. It goes wider than a Western orchestra, showing instruments from around the world and across history, string, wind, keyboard, and percussion, and how each one actually makes its sound. Your child can see the inside of a piano, the coiled tube of a French horn straightened out, a gamelan from Indonesia, a set of bagpipes taken apart. It's less a story than a museum you hold in your hands, and for a child who collects facts about instruments, it's catnip.
If your child wants every instrument there is, not just the ones in the orchestra, this opens the whole world of them, and the photograph-per-fact layout means a browser never has to read a wall of text to get to the good part. Seeing the real objects, and how they're built, rewards the exact curiosity that made your child pick up a music book in the first place. It's the widest-angle book on this shelf, the one that shows music is bigger than any one band or country.