Although the peritext is a significant feature of children's literature, it continues to receive little attention in spite of postmodern interest in metanarrative and the unstable nature of texts. Since M.R. Higonnet, in her article “The playground of the peritext”, published in Children's Literature Association Quarterly (Higonnet 1990, 47–49), pointed out some features of the peritext and their implications, my reading of South African English children's literature has suggested some further observations on the part that the peritext can play.

Every book contains a space outside the space occupied by the text itself, which is taken up with additional features comprising, among others, titles and subtitles, authors’ names and pen portraits, prefaces, forewords, introductions, acknowledgments, dedications, cover blurbs, endorsements, quotations from reviews, letters from readers, datelines, tables of contents, epigraphs, glossaries, notes, epilogues, endpapers and illustrations. Higonnet includes in her definition of peritext the material nature of some books, which goes beyond the inclusion of illustrations or the design of a book as a picture book, to embrace constructions such as pop-up, moveable and fold-out books. On a more arcane level, modern collectors, as Cooper and Cooper (1998, vii) point out, value dust wrappers of children's books, and in fact the British Library has a special catalogue to enable researchers to consult its collection of wrappers.

A simple inventory of peritextual items suggests how many voices and readers are at work. Among the voices are authors and implied authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, reviewers, and prominent personages. Some of these are identified, some are anonymous, and some have an identity that is complex and problematical. Similarly, the identity of the implied reader of the peritextual material is not a simple matter. Often the implied reader is not the youthful reader of the book, but the mediating adult – usually a parent or relative, librarian or school teacher, or (in the nineteenth century) the Sunday school teacher, who will buy the book or approve it for reading, or even read it to young children. The peritexts sometimes give an indication of the reader that the author had in mind. Adults also read children's books, and authors sometimes connive at this, even when ostensibly addressing children.