By Dorothy Kunhardt
The 1940 book that started touch-and-feel: a soft bunny to pat, a little mirror to look in, and a strip of sandpaper that's Daddy's scratchy face.
Paul and Judy pat the bunny, and so does your baby — there's a patch of soft fake fur set right into the page for them to touch. Judy plays peekaboo behind a scrap of cloth, so your baby lifts it to find her. A flower is scented with baby powder. A tiny book is bound inside the book. There's a mirror, where your baby meets their own face. There's a strip of sandpaper that's Daddy's scratchy cheek, and a ring to poke a finger through. Barely any words, seven things to do with your hands. Dorothy Kunhardt put it together in 1940, and it's been the same seven small pleasures ever since.
It's the touching. Almost everything a baby wants from a book at eight months is here in one object: something soft, something rough, something that smells, something that moves, and their own face looking back. Kunhardt made it for her own daughter, and it's sold more than six million copies since. For a book with about forty words in it, that number tells you it hit something real. It's also the kind of book that gets handed down. A grandparent will spot it across the room and go a little quiet, and in plenty of families the copy on the shelf was given, not bought. What it isn't is sturdy. The whole appeal is the fur and the mirror and the sandpaper, and every one of those is a piece glued onto a page. They come off. The fur goes bald, the flower stops smelling, the cloth gets tugged loose, and the spiral binding lets a determined baby pull a page right out. That's what a book earns for being handled by babies, but if you're hoping to save it for a younger sibling, buy two.