Why are you sitting in a box?

My house is full of cardboard boxes, strings, straws, paper towel tubes, and other components of the boys’ various machines. These machines have many uses: they fly and swim, are used in construction projects, and prove out the various theories that five-year-old boys generate about the world. It’s not unusual for bits and pieces of things to make their way home–cups and straws from Ikea, water bottles and newspapers–to be incorporated into some new invention.

So it’s not surprising that Antoinette Portis’ Not a Box has been a hit. With simple but imaginative line drawings, a young rabbit’s box-bound adventures come to life. Packed inside an empty box are a race car, a hot air balloon, a robot, a mountain … a box can hold a lot of fascinating things. Packaged in a brown-paper cover, “Not a Box” captures the magic of play that a discarded box offers.

It’s not that the boys are “deprived” of toys; they have Legos and trains and a swing set with a pirate flag. But simple bits of twine and cardboard can occupy them for hours because there are no boundaries to what they can become.