It is an often overlooked fact that one of the easiest ways to learn about a foreign culture is through the books it produces for its children. Shortly after my family moved to the Netherlands last summer, we discovered “zoekboeks” (pronounced “zhook-book”) the genre of kids’ picture books that invite you to search (“zoek”) for characters, objects or events obscured by visual busyness. English-language books for kids are hard to come by here, and we didn’t speak or read Dutch yet, so the wordless zoekboek was a welcome find.
The zoekboek is closely related to a German genre, the Wimmelbuch, or “teeming book.” A “wimmelbook” — in this era of fluid borders and cultures, the word is often rendered as a mash-up of German and English — is “a book of plenitude,” writes Cornelia Rémi, a German professor who is the only scholar known to consider the genre in depth.

She argues that the zoekboek and the wimmelbook differ from each other: The zoekboek gives the reader explicit search tasks (where’s Waldo?) and often uses words, while the wordless wimmelbooks “allow for manifold reading options and encourage a highly active response from children and adults, which rightfully might be called a form of playing.” When I now read traditional storybooks (which we also do at home), they seem rigid and prescribed in comparison.
My family reads our wimmelbooks so much, we’re loving them out of their bindings. But they really sank their teemingness into me as I was reading Richard Sennett’s “The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile,” in which he describes how the political revolutions of 1848 redefined nationalism from one based on monarchies or concocted geographic partitions to one based on ordinary rituals, everyday life and authentic selves.

The revolutionaries of the age “believed that a nation was enacted by custom, by the manner and mores of a volk: the food people eat, how they move when they dance, the dialect they speak, the precise forms of their prayers,” Mr. Sennett writes. Wimmelbooks do just that — they show people glorying “in their ordinary selves,” as he puts it.