Magic Land of Toys
2006
First Published
4.42
Average Rating
211
Number of Pages
Here is an unusual, charming book of toys, games, and children’s literature, written by the author of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places . More than 500 rare and beautiful toys from the renowned collection of Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs are photographed by Michel Pintado in tableaux of children’s playrooms from 1870 to the present. These unearthly photographs—amusing, moving, intriguing, and at times, terrifying—alternate with text by Alberto Manguel that mingles the real and the imaginary, truth and fiction, retelling both well-known and obscure children’s stories.
Avg Rating
4.42
Number of Ratings
12
5 STARS
50%
4 STARS
42%
3 STARS
8%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Alberto Manguel
Author · 31 books
Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991). Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
