This volume introduces an international readership to the role books have played in the lives and upbringing of young people in the Nordic countries from the 1750s until today. Charlotte Appel and Nina Christensen look beyond an overview of noteworthy texts and characters to address the region’s distinctive reading cultures and the interactions between literature and changing views of childhood, with a special focus on Denmark. The emergence of a dedicated market for children’s books in the Global North coincided with national school reforms, when Luther’s Small Catechism started to be supplemented—or replaced—by new books published for and about young readers, learners, and citizens. Children’s use of books and media is closely related to adults’ wishes to influence the present and future of a child through instruction, entertainment, or play. Chapters point to strong continuities as well as remarkable changes in the relationships between child readers and adult authors, artists, publishers, teachers, librarians, and parents through the centuries. Focusing on children as the central users and producers of texts, this interdisciplinary and transnational history shows how children’s exposure to and use of media impacted the Nordic welfare state, and vice versa. The ways adults facilitated—and in some cases prevented—access to picture books, schoolbooks, textbooks, comics, magazines, and other media to youth between infancy and adolescence reveals the complicated interplay between children’s internal wishes and grown-ups’ external expectations over time. As narratives for young audiences are continuously rewritten, republished, and adapted into new forms, this pithy synthesis brings forward new knowledge about the material and social history of books, literature, and childhood.

Text in Danish. This publication deals with the encounter between the common Danish population of the 17th century and the printed word -- and not least with the foundations of that meeting. Appel examines the teaching of reading and the reading abilities of the age in society outside the circles of the cultural elite, and questions the general conception of a predominantly illiterate population. The book draws a sketch of the book market of that period, marked by expansion and differentiation, and of the various attempts of the public authorities, including the church, to control and make use of the new media. It also tells of the various interests of the population in the art of reading, and of the channels -- sale, loans and gift exchange -- through which the printed papers reached the readers of the 17th century.