The cardboard box has long been regarded as the imaginative plaything par excellence. In 2005, the box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Toy Industry Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY—institutionalizing a decades-old association between cardboard and children’s creative play. On the page and onscreen, in museum galleries, schools, toy aisles, and at home, today cardboard occupies a privileged position within children’s material culture where the promises of ...