‘Your Future Self Will Thank You!’: Creating future childhood memories in time-capsule activity books for children

I am interested here in the niche but successful subgenre of activity books for children that can be labelled ‘time-capsule’ books – namely, books to be filled by the child reader-writer, with the purpose of rediscovering, ‘in the future’, their own self-curated childhood memories. Those books typically require considerable work from the child, guided by specific and often banal writing and drawing prompts. That work is justified by stressing the child’s ‘future self’’s delight, gratitude, emotion, etc. when rediscovering those carefully archived memories. Through close exploration of a corpus of time-capsule activity books, I analyse the paradoxical conceptions of childhood and time that these books encourage. They invite the child to indulge in complex temporal fantasies around their own childhood, conceived of as already past, but also as a potentially disruptive, joyful jolt to their adult self. The success of that jolt relies on a strategy of powerful affect: these books seek to overwhelm the future adult with feeling, abolishing temporal distance. To do this, they seek to make that past self present in the future, not through narrative devices, but evocative ones. The personal time-capsule proposes a poetic approach to cross-temporal communication in order to affect the future.