I Spy: A Book of Picture Riddles by Walter Wick and Jean Marzollo

Do kids read the I Spy books these days? If you’re not familiar, I Spy was a series of look-and-find books for younger children, each book featuring several busy still-life photographs of scenes littered with toys and assorted knickknacks, captioned with couplets of the form “I spy…,” the object, of course, being to seek out in the photographs the items mentioned in the rhyming “I spy” clues. Back in the 90s, when these books were published, video games weren’t as sophisticated or as portable as they are now, so the kind of low-tech interactivity offered by a look-and-find book had something unique to offer America’s children; but nowadays I’m sure there are all manner of shovelware pixel-hunter games for the iPad and maybe there’s no point in buying physical books that take up space and never offer a new playing experience.

On the other hand, I Spy is probably the pinnacle of the look-and-find genre: the use of real objects in practical scenes inherently provides a level of detail to the illustrations not seen in other look-and-find books that feature hand- or computer-drawn pictures, and, perhaps precisely because the authors of I Spy, Walter Wick and Jean Marzollo, only got one chance at shooting each scene, the photographs demonstrate an extraordinary amount of care in putting together realistic snapshots of mundane clutter: beach toys haphazardly left lying around by children, antique playing cards and dice stuffed away in the attic, masks and costume jewelry left lying around after a girls’ dress-up game, pinecones and leaves strewn on the ground as if they were finds from a nature hike. It was an inspired choice to make all the scenes still-lifes: omitting actual living people and animals from the shots makes the books all the more realistic: the child is able to interact with these quiet, desolate but lived-in scenes just as they would with a book, focusing on the cluttered props, examining them at their own pace, instead of having to interact with another living creature.

It’s not easy to make a child understand nostalgia, but there’s even a kind of wistfulness in these shots of abandoned toys and other trinkets: the playthings are here, but the kids are conspicuously absent. Maybe they’re just in another room or down the beach or up the trail, but there’s really no saying where the children have gone. And perhaps that wistfulness is part of why Wick and Marzollo seem to so thoroughly eschew the exotic in their books: I would say the props they use and the scenes they compose are “timeless,” avoiding recognizable brands, state-of-the-art technology (and remember we’re talking about the 1990s), or any situation that would be even slightly unfamiliar to a child living in the twentieth-century United States (maybe in particular twentieth-century New England), but really all I’m saying is that parents reading these books with their millennial children would have felt the I Spy books could represent scenes from their own childhoods. Maybe the I Spy books wouldn’t seem so mundane to kids today, but as a natural-born citizen of the twentieth century I can readily recognize the world of I Spy as the Platonic realm of childhood, however much that world differed from my own, with motorized, self-propelled, electronic toys and computer games and multiculturalism and Saturday-morning cartoons.

I mean, yes, they’re books for small children, but my point is that there’s something in the I Spy series that even adults, maybe even adults who were too old or too young to read them as kids, can appreciate. Just today I read the very first I Spy book, the one with no subtitle other than A Book of Picture Riddles that was first printed in 1992, and the “I spy” clues aren’t always as trivial as you might expect them to be. Some of them are a real challenge, and maybe that’s one of the many signs that this first book is a little rough around the edges. Of the more challenging clues, a common move in this book is to have the reader find a high number of objects of one kind: the first scene, titled “Blocks,” asks you to locate “eleven bears in all,” referring to these little primary-colored plastic gummy bears perched around the block structure; again, in the “Tiny Toys” scene, which is one of the many scenes in which the props appear to be floating in mid-air against a white background (I think they’re really attached to pegs), we’re asked to find “eleven fish with fins.” These clues might be challenging enough to a child just learning to count, but with these high quantities it really can be tough just keeping track of the objects you’ve already found. A more interesting version of the “find a high number of objects of the same kind” clue is one from the “Toys in the Attic” scene, where you’re meant to find “a lion and eight other cats.” I’m sure there’s plenty of educational value in the I Spy books for children under seven or so, but one really good thing they do is introduce kids to analogical thinking: seeing connections between things that aren’t really the same but have something more abstract in common; and the “lion and eight other cats” clue is a great example of analogical reasoning. For one thing, the lion you’re supposed to find is really a picture of a lion on a building block, which maybe is supposed to hint to the reader that he’s going to have to be a little creative to find all eight cats: there are five black cats printed on playing cards and boxes for toys and games, and four of these black cats are perched in the exact same way, and three even have the same red bow wrapped around their necks, so it would be easy for a child to miss three other cats in the picture: two that are gray with black stripes and which are printed on a greeting card and a box, and one white cat, printed on a harmonica, who’s playing a fiddle in the nursery rhyme in which a cow jumps over the moon.

Analogic thinking plays a big role in some of the harder clues; another one I think kids might have a hard time at is in the “At the Beach” scene: “a very SANDY word.” As the capital letters might suggest, you’re supposed to find five plastic letters on the sand that spell “SANDY,” but only the letter S is actually covered in sand. The whole word isn’t sandy, only one letter is. But really this clue is more of a pun than actual information about how sandy or not sandy the word is: an adult knows immediately to read between the lines and look for the letters that spell “SANDY,” but a small child might take this clue literally, making it a good object lesson on puns and figurative language. While I’m talking about the “At the Beach” scene, there is another clue that I think is almost unfair to kids: “thirty-one cents,” we’re asked to find, being directed to a quarter, a nickel, and a penny partly buried in the sand at different locations in the picture. So not only are children supposed to be able to add up 25, 5, and 1, but they’re supposed to be familiar enough with coin denominations to recognize a partly obscured quarter, nickel, and penny: this clue would be very hard for I Spy’s intended age group.

I don’t know how often kids will have to identify half-buried coinage in their normal lives, but it is useful to teach them new vocabulary, as this clue does in the “Round & Round” scene, another one of those that’s a collage of assorted objects floating in mid-air: “A little round face that used to tell time.” We’re meant to find a black clock face with no hands, and quite possibly this will be the first time a child has ever heard of a clock having a “face,” and he might not realize that “used to tell time” is a bit of figurative speech meaning simply that the clock is missing the pointing arrows with which it normally tells the time: maybe this clock face never told time because it never had arms at all, but that’s not the point of the phrase “used to tell time.”

Sometimes, though, I think being an adult can be a disadvantage when solving these clues: take the “Arts & Crafts” scene, where we have to find “a three-letter word, and flying underneath, a great white bird.” The three-letter word is easy enough: the eye is immediately drawn to the letters SKY, each painted sky blue with white clouds. The great white bird isn’t so trivial, even though we’re told it’s flying underneath SKY. For a while I was thinking that “flying underneath” must be a red herring, maybe it just meant that generally birds fly “underneath” the sky, not that it was underneath those sky-blue letters in the scene, but finally I realized that the great bird was the piece of white construction paper taking up about a third of the scene: against the white table, it just looked like another surface with arts-and-crafts props strewn on it. And while it was much bigger than those letters, the bird was in fact situated under SKY: maybe a child would have found the bird quicker.

But some clues in this book I wouldn’t blame anyone, child or adult, for not getting: in the “Make Believe” scene, featuring implements for playing dress-up, we’re expected to find “a heart-shaped box,” but, alas, this box is most likely the light-pink container holding a red comb, in the upper middle of the picture, folded into the gutter!

Not quite unfair, but also pretty challenging, is the final scene in I Spy: A Book of Picture Riddles, which offers a twist on the somewhat monotonous “objects suspended in midair” genre by shining lights behind the props, putting them in silhouette: “I also spy something from every other page.” It’s a little bit ambiguous, but, since there’s a bonus clue in the back of the book asking us to find one unique object that appeared in every scene (it’s a squatting green frog), I take this final clue to mean that we’re supposed to find some silhouette object that appeared in each of the previous scenes in the book, I guess ideally a different object for each picture. There are probably multiple solutions, but ultimately you just have to bite the bullet and start flipping back and forth between “Silhouettes” and each other scene, seeing if any common objects jump out at you. It might help to first look at the biggest objects, and you may even find yourself recognizing some of the silhouettes from past pictures.

In similar spirit is another set of bonus clues at the back of the book: we’re given thirteen couplets, and we’re asked to go back and figure out which couplet matches which of the thirteen scenes, based on the objects mentioned in the couplets. My advice with these would be that Wick and Marzollo didn’t try too hard to trick us with these orphan riddles: if you find just two objects in a scene that match a couplet, you’ve probably found the right picture, and you should be able to locate the other objects if you keep looking. You might even be able to guess from some of the names of the objects themselves which scenes they go with, and, if you find yourself daunted by this bonus challenge, remember that I Spy is a children’s book, so how hard can it really be?

So I would submit that the I Spy books are worth taking a look at even if you have no children to share them with, whether it’s to reminisce a little or to experience for the first time this late-twentieth-century answer to the cabinet of curiosity. I remarked above on the reasons why I thought the photos featured in the series were so artful, but my favorite picture in the original I Spy: A Book of Picture Riddles is actually one that tends to fly in the face of the general I Spy philosophy: it’s a bulletin board filled with photographs of real people, perhaps friends and family members of the person who put all these pictures together. Though technically it’s a still-life, it’s a little uncanny, in a book where we’re so used to looking at some quiet scene in a private moment, to see all these faces looking back at us. In addition to the photos of people, there are other mementos: a ticket to a New York baseball Yankees game; a blue nonspecific “1^st Place” ribbon; a butterfly made out of blue, red, and yellow pipe cleaners; childish drawings of a mother ordering, for some unknown reason, her kids, dressed in boots and raincoats, to put on different clothes instead, and another of a mother (who knows if it’s the same mother?) taking her kids to the park. I think we can even identify the character responsible for assembling this bulletin board: at the bottom, near the center of the scene, there’s a rather audacious clipping from a newspaper soliciting a free newborn kitten in need of a home, preferably “orange stripped,” and immediately to the left there’s a photograph of a tawny cat being held by brown-haired girl in a navy-blue dress and a white headband.