"To some degree, picture books force an analog way of thinking,"

said Karen Lotz, the publisher of Candlewick Press in Somerville, Mass. “From picture to picture, as the reader interacts with the book, their imagination is filling in the missing themes.”

As an argument, where the premises are supposed to add up to the conclusion, this statement is baffling—written texts, no less than pictorial ones, require that a reader supply imaginative analogs to hold characters and stories together from one sentence to the next (it would be insane to suggest that with the written word, everything you need to know is on the page); lacking information which the audience's imagination must reconstruct is typically held to be a property of digital representations, which are inherently gappy collections of samples—but something about it is right. You're going to lose if you try to make a philosophically sturdy distinction between picture-knowing and word-knowing—some written texts are as untranslatable as pictures, some pictures can be rendered in words; picture books have a symbolic vocabulary (reading one is not at all an experience of pure seeing); resembling the things they represent is not the unique province of pictures (nor, within language, is resemblance limited to obvious onomatopoeisis (read Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, or listen to him read it, and you'll hear how mimetic sense can be fully carried in sound)); nor is it vision's special privilege to overflow whatever linguistic map is applied to it, for language is as excessive as any sensory medium; words overflow themselves—but I want to say, yes, pictures open different worlds and call for different forms of thinking and occasion deeper swims of mind. So I think I agree with Karen Lotz, and I am horrified by the trend of forcing children to read at earlier and earlier ages.