Every Picture Tells a Story: The Art of Narrative in Wordless Books

Visual Storytelling

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a book as “a written document,” but the 20th century produced a robust tradition of books without any writing at all. Such wordless books rely on visual cues to tell their stories, drawing on traditions of wordless story-telling such as pantomime, medieval stained glass windows, African American “story quilts,” cartoons, and silent films, to name a few.

A 20th-Century Phenomenon

In the early 20th century, “woodcut novelists” like Lynd Ward began exploring narrative elements in their art, leading to a mini-explosion of wordless books for adults and contributing to the eventual development of the modern graphic novel. Although scattered examples of wordless children’s stories existed before 1970, the last three decades have seen an increase in the production of picture-stories for children, which are more easily re-purposed for a global audience than are books that require expensive translation.

Not Just For Children

This display presents a selection of narratives told entirely in pictures. While the tradition of illustrated children’s books lends itself more easily to wordless picture-stories, the display includes several notable “picture novels” containing  mature themes that were clearly aimed at adult audiences.

A bibliography of wordless books included in the display is available for download.

To find more wordless books, search the UW Libraries Catalog with the Genre/Form heading "Stories without Words."

Pictured, clockwise from top left: illustrations from God’s Man, by Lynd Ward (1930); The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, by Molly Bang (1980); The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs (1978); Free Fall, by David Wiesner (1988)