Documentary books for children – with their rich iconography, varying from archival photographs to fictional drawings – are used as non-formal tools for the teaching of history. In this semiotical study we analyze a corpus of historic documentaries. We show how the iconography is related to editorial, gender, and disciplinary factors, and how the iconographic choices reveal relationships with historical sources and with historical events. Editorial enunciation assigns interpretative roles to the reader which derive from editorial projects, historical interpretative models and iconographical registers. The young reader is successively spectator, historian and inheritor.