Students on the V&A / RCA History of Design Postgraduate Programme can enrich their learning experience by contributing to live museum projects. In this series, we share some of the exciting discoveries made by students who helped to rehome the National Art Library’s large collection of children’s books when it moved to V&A Storehouse earlier this year.
The County Album (1829) by John Harris
The County Album (published by John Harris in 1829) looks rather ordinary at first glance. Yet its pages reveal a playful surprise: instead of plain text, many of the nouns are replaced by tiny illustrations. Sheep, castles, coal, rivers, and ships appear in miniature, woven into the sentences. This unusual format is described in the book’s preface as ‘hieroglyphics’. This is a rebus-like writing system that invites readers to decode images alongside words.
This book contains ‘four hundred topographical hieroglyphics, indicative of the products, staple commodities, manufactures, and objects of interest in England and Wales.’ That sounds rather serious, but really, this was geography in disguise. Instead of pages of dry information, children in 1829 got to travel through England and Wales by decoding pictures as they read. It feels like solving a puzzle or playing a game of charades on the page.
The preface admits the trick: ‘a book without pictures is to some young readers the most uninteresting thing in the world.’ John Harris was one of the most inventive children’s publishers of the nineteenth century and heknew exactly how to keep young readers hooked. If children were tempted to skip the hard work of reading, he made sure the pictures themselves were the key to unlocking the story.
Two hundred years later, the idea still feels fresh. After all, who doesn’t use emojis? A pizza slice here, a laughing face there: we all read in pictures more often than we realise. In that sense, The County Album was ahead of its time. Its young readers were doing the nineteenth-century version of ‘emoji reading’.
The marbled cover of the book is neat, plain and seemingly ordinary. But once open, the book starts to wink at you. In bringing nineteenth-century England and Wales so vividly to life, it is a reminder that books can hold many surprises. Imagine a reprint today that let children colour in the hieroglyphics themselves? It could turn a clever nineteenth-century idea into an interactive twenty-first-century hit.
So next time you scroll through your emojis, think of The County Album. Long before the digital age, John Harris was already turning reading into a picture game and making geography anything but boring.
To see what else V&A/RCA History of Design students have been up to, read our other blog posts or check our pages on the RCA website. You can even find out how to apply for 2026/2027 admission to MA V&A/RCA History of Design here.
