A Childrens Games Anthology: Studies in Folklore and Anthropology

by Brian Sutton-Smith (Editor)

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Hal Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, as the title promises, a series of essays on children's games taken from (and I mean straight-up photocopied from) various books and journals that span nearly a century. Because each essay is a facsimile reproduction, the pagination is useless, and the typeface and layout, for people who care about these things, are all over the map. I spent most of the book wishing the essays were given some kind of brief introduction with background; since an essay could be just a chapter extracted from a book, there's often not even the barest introduction, and in consequence it's not always easy to tell what continent the games described come from. But by the time I was done, I'd decided that part of the charm of this book is its crazy-quilt quality, in the varying degrees of detail and academic rigor its often long-dead contributors bring, and in their widely varied interests. Eventually it becomes clear that Aklan's in the Philippines and Baiga Chak's in India, and figuring it out is probably more fun than just getting told straight out.

Still a weird book.