Learning & Development: All about ... Picture books

It's very easy to take picture books for granted. After all, they're in every nursery, playgroup and reception class. If you walk into a bookshop or newsagent there are nearly always a few of them to buy. On children's television, there are still times when presenters and celebrities read from picture books while we see the pictures from the books displayed on the screen.

In fact, like many of the inventions we take for granted, the picture books we look at and read with our children have a fairly recent history. In the past, it used to be that only a very few privileged children ever got a glimpse of one. The one place where stories were told to everyone from every walk in life through big, lively, coloured pictures was on the walls of churches. But it would take several hundred years for this way of telling stories to reach into every child's hand in the form of a book. The route it took was through such things as little black-and-white pamphlets sold on the street (called chapbooks), followed by hand-tinted booklets of stories and rhymes sold mostly to middle-class children in the first decades of the 19th century.