Silent books are books meant to be shared with people who may not share a language—people who are refugees, people who are young children, people who wonder how the world might seem in places and cultures about which they themselves know nothing.
Drama teacher Rose-Marie Lindfors wrote a pamphlet—that does have words—for the Silent Books project in Sweden, explaining what silent books are, and some ways they can be useful and used. The image you see here is the cover of the English language version of that Swedish pamphlet about books that have no words and so are tied tightly to no one particular language.
Jennifer Farrar talks about how she and other researchers and teachers and students at Glasgow University’s School of Education look at silent books.
The Silent Books Project began as one attempt to deal with a seemingly-unsolvable problem:
In response to the waves of refugees from Africa and the Middle East arriving in the Italian island, Lampedusa, IBBY launched the project “Silent Books, from the world to Lampedusa and back” in 2012. The project involved creating the first library on Lampedusa to be used by local and immigrant children.
The second part required creating a collection of silent books (wordless picture books) that could be understood and enjoyed by children regardless of language. These books were collected from IBBY National Sections, over one hundred books from over twenty countries. This set of books was deposited at the documentation and research archive in Rome (Palazzo della Esposizioni), a set delivered to the library in Lampedusa and a further set was part of a travelling exhibition.
There are, to date, three collections of Silent Books: the Silent Books Collection 2013 (110 books), the Silent Books Collection 2015 (51 books) and the Silent Books Collection 2017 (79 books).
