By Kate Merritt, Amy Pixton
A peekaboo game for the youngest babies, printed on tough washable fabric so it survives chewing, drooling, and a trip through the wash.
Something is hiding behind the toys. Your baby turns the page and finds a face — peekaboo, it's Puppy. That's the book, start to finish: a hidden thing, a turned page, a friendly face waiting on the other side. Kate Merritt builds the pictures out of cut-paper collage, big and bright and a little chunky, so a baby who can't focus on much yet can still catch the shape. There are maybe a dozen words in the whole thing. What sets this one apart from the rest of the baby shelf is the material. It's a synthetic fabric that feels like paper but won't behave like paper. Water rolls off it. Teeth don't get through it. There's no cover and no binding, because the pages have nothing to protect.
Peekaboo is often the first joke a baby gets, and here it's peekaboo they can hold in their own hands. Underneath the fun it's working the thing a baby spends the whole first year on: figuring out that something still exists even when you can't see it. Plenty of babies will want it over and over, and it holds up to that. The other half is physical. Babies read with their mouths. The Indestructibles series was invented by a mother of triplets who got tired of fishing chewed board-book corners out of little mouths, and these are printed on flashspun polyethylene fibers — the stuff feels like paper, but liquid can't pass through it and it's very hard to tear. Workman calls them chew proof, rip proof, drool proof, and nontoxic, and says to wash with warm water and mild soap, or just take it in the tub. You can hand this one over and not think about what happens to it.