From Victorian parents toting toddlers behind their bicycles to wartime youngsters in gas masks, from staged dress-up scenes to diaper-clad babies in a race toward a finish line of stuffed toys, this book offers a remarkable view of childhood in decades past, including activities that might make a modern parent blanch. Here are images from a "peanut race" that bloodied the noses of its young participants, as well as numerous snaps of young smokers, a boy on a bed of nails, future acrobats in the air, and celebrity visits with kids by the late Adam West as Batman and Gene Simmons from the rock band Kiss. In this entry in the Retronaut series of photo albums, Wolfgang Wild collects unexpected images that challenge conventional ideas of past times, helping us see how, for the people who lived then, it was "now"—just a different now from the one we know.