"Art you can carry, stories you can touch". Suzy Lee´s definition of silent books is wonderful. If you enjoy reading traditional picturebooks with text, you are in for a treat - silent books are a whole, new literary word waiting to be explored. 

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Here in Scandinavia, silent books are still something out of the ordinary, but they have been an important part of the international world of picturebooks ever since the 1960s. Back then, they were named "wordless" picture books, a term that might give new readers the impression that these books are somehow lacking, somehow "less than"... The term silent books is more modern, and points to both the silent power of the pictures, and to the communicative and artistic possibilites a starting point of silence might offer.

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When I first heard about silent books, I thought of them as a genre, but they are not. A genre requires similarities in things like plot or character building or themes, and silent books are way to diverse to fit into narrow categories. I like the way Evelyn Arizpe defines them: As text where the pictures carry the weight of story, and where the absense of words contribute to the meaning-making. The fact that these books have few or no words also contribute something else: Availability to all readers, regardless of language skills, age, literacy level or cultural background.

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Picturebooks are often viewed as children´s literature only, but silent books very often work for all ages: You can use the same book in a kindergarten group and a high school class. How it is mediated and experienced will be very different, but it will be highly valued in both settings.

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To be able to create a narrative without words, the illustrators makes the most of both the illustrations and the format of the book. The result is often a very interesting work of art, both a story to be told an an object to be studied.

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Silent books come in all kinds of formats with all kinds of illustration styles. Some of them are very artistic and edgy, others more traditional. The one thing they have in common is that they have room for your stories (for an example of this, see the bottom of this page!) You are the narrator, an adventurer bravely navigating through the literary landscape without any text to help you find your way. It is wonderful and exciting and sometimes frustrating - but it is never boring.

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I want to share a funny, little story with you. Because silent books are, as mentioned, not a genre, but a very diverse group of literature, they are also hard to categorize and display in libraries. The first time I went to Bologna, I did of course make a visit to the beautiful library Salaborsa (Salaborsa is a "library" the same way a Porche is a "car").  I was very excited to see what silent books they had in their collection. I found the silent book shelf, and their collection is amazing, but I could not figure out how it was organized. The books were not sorted by author´s name, nor by title, nor by country... As I was standing there pondering, a librarian approached me, clearly understanding my confusion. He looked at me and said: "We had not idea how to sort them, so we just sorted them by size" 😅





 

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I hope this page gives you the inspiration you need to read, share and mediate silent books!

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@Anita Berge, 2025