The text presented here is a reflection that starts from the analysis of a picture book edited with a pre-reader in mind, The quilt. A story in panels (Martins & Kono 2010), in which the topic of reading objects will benefit the initiation to literary reading. Responding to the theme of this dossier, the cultural space in which the public library has the mission to build itself and which, not uniformly, it practices as a space of conviviality between people and books, in which these are simultaneously steppingstones and targets, has changed during the two periods of confinement between 2020 and 2021. The contact with the book as a manipulable object that facilitates the approach to the act of reading, in line with the visual language that the architecture of children's books contemplates with special care, seems to have forced a return to the ear as the first sense for these pre-readers. Our reading of this children's book is a sample exercise which may be replicated in sessions that meet the methodologies of the Public Humanities, in which, by not being distracted by what the literary text evokes or suggests, it will make us return to it to focus on the level that interests us. In this case, it was the attention given to stories about several absences which objects bring with them and which the reading of literature makes present, even in the absence of the book