A new edited volume has been published by Palgrave Macmillen titled Toys and Communication and edited by Luísa Magalhães and Jeffrey Goldstein. Here’s the blurb from the publisher website:

There are few scholarly books about toys, and even fewer that consider toys within the context of culture and communication. Toys and Communication is an innovative collection that effectively showcases work by specialists who have sought to examine toys throughout history and in many cultures, including 1930’s Europe, Morocco, India, Spanish art of the 16th-19th centuries. Psychologists stress the importance of the role of toys and play in children’s language development and intellectual skills, and this book demonstrates the recurrent theme of the transmission of cultural norms through the portrayal, presentation and use of toys. The text establishes the role of toy and play park design in eliciting particular forms of play, as well as stressing the child’s use of toys to ‘become’ more adult. It will be beneficial for courses in education, developmental psychology, communications, media studies, and toy design.

Here’s an overview of the book’s content:

Part I Toys and Communication. Preliminary Issues
1 Toys and Communication: An Introduction – Jeffrey Goldstein
2 The End of Play and the Fate of Digital Play Media: A Historical Perspective on the Marketing of Play Culture – Stephen Kline
3 Toys: Between Rhetoric of Education and Rhetoric of Fun – Gilles Brougère
4 A Toy Semiotics, Revisited – David Myers

Part II Language Development
5 Age Differences in the Use of Toys as Communication Tools – Amanda Gummer
6 LMNOBeasts™: Using Typographically Inspired Toys to Aid Development of Language and Communication Skills in Early Childhood – Todd Maggio, Kerri Phillips and Christina Madix

Part III Toys, Culture and Communication
7 Images of Toys in Spanish Art (15th–19th Centuries): Iconographic Languages – Oriol Vaz-Romero Trueba and Michel Manson
8 Communication in Moroccan Children’s Toys and Play – Jean-Pierre Rossie
9 Dincs as Worldviews: Things that Communicate a Mind – Koumudi Patil
10 Holocaust War Games: Playing with Genocide – Suzanne Seriff
11 Working Class Children’s Toys in Times of War and Famine. Play, Work and the Agency of Children in Piraeus Neighborhoods During the German Occupation of Greece – Cleo Gougoulis
12 Can Toy Premiums Induce Healthy Eating? – Carla Ferreira and Luísa Agante
13 You Are What You Eat: Toying with the Process of Becoming – Mariah Wade

Part IV Toy Design and Play Spaces
14 Work and Play in a Theme Park – Luísa Magalhães
15 Design for Rebellious Play – Lieselotte van Leeuwen and Mathieu Gielen
16 Hong Kong PolyPlay: An Innovation Lab for Design, Play, and Education – Rémi Leclerc

The book can be bought or downloaded as pdf/epub on the publisher’s website.