Examining the do-it-yourself children’s book by Fedor Kobrinets and Isaak Eberil Knizhka-kino-seans o tom, kak pioner Gans Stachechnyi Komitet spas (1931), this contribution investigates the intersections between paper, politics, pedagogy, and film.

It suggests that around 1930 with the advent of a genuine Soviet children’s media technology, diafil’m filmstrips sized down the “abstract” silent cinema of the 1920s to tangible and comprehensible mini-objects that possessed the “hands-on” quality of a picture book.