From publisher’s perspective, it is well known that the translation of texts also is a matter of negotiating license rights, while format, illustrations and paper quality are up to the publisher. The choices reflects different ideals as ideas about the considered reader, recognising how important the choices are according to the motivating aspects of the reading experience. For readers, it is equally obvious that books in their material aspects have the capacity to engage emotionally and hereby motivate to further reading. This recognition brings the reader/viewer’s embodied memories, aisthesis, to the centre of our analysis.Aisthesis can be summarized as the embodied experience that is actualized in the rhetorical experience. Closely linked to aisthesis are other concepts such as memory (memoria), emotions (pathos), imagination (phantasia), all of which have an impact on our motivation. Through the concept of aisthesis, the critic’s attention is drawn to this composite experience, in which the rhetorical artefact is a component and cannot be isolated as an object of analysis. Using the classical concept of aisthesis as a reference framework the starting point of this presentation are illustrations for different editions of Astrid Lindgren’s work (Karlsson on the Roof, Pippi Longstocking) in the GDR, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Russia.