Seek-and-Find Picture Books: A History From Bruegel to the Wimmelbuch

Looking hard at a crowded picture is one of the oldest pleasures art offers. Long before anyone printed a puzzle book, painters filled panels with so many small scenes that a viewer had to hunt through them, and audiences loved them for it.

Find Otto belongs to that long line. This is a short history of the seek-and-find picture, from Flemish panels to the paperback, the magazine, the computer and the daily puzzle, and of the different ideas each one added.

The crowded picture as something to be searched starts in the Low Countries. Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between about 1490 and 1510 and now in the Prado in Madrid, packs its three panels with hundreds of tiny figures doing strange things, and centuries of viewers have pored over it looking for the next detail.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder made the crowd the subject. In 1559 he painted Netherlandish Proverbs, now in Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, a village in which sayings are acted out literally: a man banging his head against a brick wall, another filling in the well after the calf has drowned. Scholars have identified around 126 proverbs and idioms in it. The same year he painted The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, a town square seething with revellers and penitents. A year later came Children's Games, now in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, a town given over entirely to children at play, in which some eighty different games have been identified.

None of these was a puzzle in the modern sense. There was no list to tick off and no single figure to find. But they taught viewers to read a picture by searching it, and they established the look every busy picture book since has inherited: a high viewpoint, a crowd spread evenly across the page, and dozens of small stories happening at once.

The nineteenth century turned searching into a game. Printers sold "puzzle pictures": a landscape or a street scene with a face, an animal or a figure hidden in its trees, rocks and clouds, and a line inviting the reader to find it. One of the most popular subjects came after Napoleon's death in 1821, when prints of his tomb appeared with the emperor's own silhouette hidden in the scenery around it; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds several.

In June 1946 two educators, Garry Cleveland Myers and Caroline Clark Myers, started Highlights for Children in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Its Hidden Pictures puzzle has appeared in every issue since: a drawing with small objects worked invisibly into the scene, and a list of what to find. Generations of children learned the habit there of searching a picture against a list.

In Germany the busy picture became a kind of book of its own. In 1968 the illustrator Ali Mitgutsch published Rundherum in meiner Stadt (All Around My City), a large, wordless book of crowded places such as markets and playgrounds, drawn half from above and half from the front so that nearly every person and object appears about the same size. It was the first of a long series, and Mitgutsch, who lived from 1935 to 2022, came to be known as the father of the form.

The form took its name from the German wimmeln, to teem or swarm: the Wimmelbuch, or teeming picture book. Its pleasure is not a target but a wander. A child turns the pages and finds stories in the crowd, the little mishaps and errands of everyday life, and follows the same characters from one spread to the next.

The tradition is very much alive. In 2003 Rotraut Susanne Berner published her Winter-Wimmelbuch, the first of a series set in one small town through the seasons, published in English as All Around Bustletown. Its characters live their own small dramas across the books, and in 2016 Berner received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international honour for illustrators of children's books.

English-language picture books took up the crowded scene in their own ways. Richard Scarry's books of Busytown filled every page with animals at work, and in Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (1974) readers hunt through the traffic for Goldbug, a tiny gold bug who turns up across its pages. He is a well-loved early example of a single small character hidden for the reader to find.

In 1986 the Australian author and illustrator Graeme Base published Animalia, an alphabet book in which each page is crammed with things beginning with its letter. Base added a second game: he hid a picture of himself as a child in every picture. A reader could come back to the book again and again, once for the alphabet and once for the boy.

In 1992 Scholastic published I Spy: A Book of Picture Riddles, with rhyming riddles by Jean Marzollo and photographs by Walter Wick. Instead of drawings, Wick arranged real objects, marbles, toys, buttons, beads, into rich tableaux and photographed them, and Marzollo's verses listed what to find in each. The series grew into many books and showed that the hunt worked just as well in a photograph as in a drawing.

Computers made the search interactive. Mother Goose: Hidden Pictures, released for the Philips CD-i in 1991, was an early hidden-object game, and the I Spy books were adapted as computer games from 1997, the same year Highlights brought out a Hidden Pictures game of its own.

The genre came of age with Mystery Case Files: Huntsville, released by Big Fish Games in 2005, at the height of the boom in casual games for home computers. Its formula, rooms full of clutter, a list of objects to find and a mystery to tie them together, became the template for the hidden-object games that followed.

The last ingredient came from somewhere else entirely. In October 2021 Josh Wardle's Wordle showed how much people enjoy a short puzzle that everyone shares, once a day, with a result they can compare and post. The New York Times bought it in January 2022, and daily puzzles of every kind followed.

Find Otto takes something from nearly every strand of this history.

• From Bruegel and the Wimmelbuch: a big, busy scene with the crowd spread right across it and small stories tucked into it. Each world tells a few of 44, from a queue for ice cream to a sheep on the loose.
• From the hidden single figure: one character to find, as with Goldbug or Base's boy, but one who changes every day. Otto is a different animal each time, which is why the clue exists.
• From Hidden Pictures and hidden-object games: a list to check. The clue is a list of the animal, a hat, a long striped scarf, a top and what he carries, and the crowd is full of decoys that match only part of it.
• From the daily puzzle: one picture for everyone, a clock, and a board that says how your time compares.

What is new is the picture itself. Bruegel painted each panel once and the Wimmelbuch is printed once, but Find Otto paints a new world every day from the date, the same for everyone and never repeated. How Find Otto makes a new world every day explains how, and who Otto is covers the character at its centre. The best way to see where the tradition has got to is to open today's picture at Find Otto.