Pop-up book

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The epithet pop-up is often applied to any three-dimensional or movable book, although properly the umbrella term movable book covers pop-ups, transformations, tunnel books, volvelles, flaps, pull-tabs, pop-outs, pull-downs, and more, each of which performs in a different manner. Also included, because they employ the same techniques, are three-dimensional greeting cards.

Pop-up types

Design and creation of such books is known as paper engineering, a term not to be confused with the term for the science of paper making. It is akin to origami in so far as the two arts both employ folded paper. However, origami tends to be focused on creating objects, whereas pop-ups tend to remain essentially pictorial and mechanical in nature. Some examples follow.

Transformations

Transformations show a scene made up of vertical slats. By pulling a tab on the side, the slats slide under and over one another to "transform" into a totally different scene. Ernest Nister, one of the early English children's book authors, often produced books solely of transformations. Many of these have been reproduced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^{[citation needed]}

Volvelles

Volvelles are paper constructions with rotating parts. An early example is the Astronomicum Caesareum, by Petrus Apianus, which was made for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles in 1540. The book is full of nested circular pieces revolving on grommets.

Tunnel books

Tunnel books (also called peepshow books) consist of a set of pages bound with two folded concertina strips on each side and viewed through a hole in the cover. Openings in each page allow the viewer to see through the entire book to the back, and images on each page work together to create a dimensional scene inside. This type of book dates from the mid-eighteenth century and was inspired by theatrical stage sets. Traditionally, these books were often created to commemorate special events or sold as souvenirs of tourist attractions. (The term "tunnel book" derives from the fact that many of these books were made to commemorate the building of the tunnel under the Thames River in London in the mid-1800s.) In the United States, tunnel books were made for such attractions as World's Fairs and the New York Botanical Gardens.

Recently the tunnel book format has been resurrected by book artist Carol Barton and others as a sculptural book form. Artists are interested not only in the book's interior views, but also in treating the side accordions and covers as informational and visual surfaces.

History

The audience for early movable books were adults, not children. It is believed that the first use of movable mechanics appeared in a manuscript for an astrological book in 1306. The Catalan mystic and poet Ramon Llull, of Majorca, used a revolving disc or volvelle to illustrate his theories. Throughout the centuries volvelles have been used for such diverse purposes as teaching anatomy, making astronomical predictions, creating secret code, and telling fortunes. By 1564 another movable astrological book titled Cosmographia Petri Apiani had been published. In the following years, the medical profession made use of this format, illustrating anatomical books with layers and flaps showing the human body. The English landscape designer Capability Brown made use of flaps to illustrate "before and after" views of his designs.

While it can be documented that books with movable parts had been used for centuries, they were almost always used in scholarly works. It was not until the eighteenth century that these techniques were applied to books designed for entertainment, particularly for children.

Movable books were popular in Germany and Britain during the 19th century, and had a period of popularity in the United States in the 1930s, when Blue Ribbon Publishing of New York was the first publisher to use the term "pop-up" to describe their movable illustrations.^[1][2]

Waldo Hunt is credited with reviving pop-up books for children in the United States in the 1960s.^[1][3] He and two companies he established, Graphics International and Intervisual Books, produced hundreds of pop-up books for children between the 1960s and 1990s. Although intended for U.S. audiences, these books were assembled in areas with lower labor costs: initially in Japan and later in Singapore and Latin American countries such as Colombia and Mexico. Hunt's first pop-up book was Bennett Cerf's Pop-Up Riddle Book, published by Random House as a promotion for Maxwell House Coffee and showcasing the work of humorist Bennett Cerf, who was then president of Random House.^[1][3] The team of Waldo Hunt and Christopher Cerf created a total of 30 more children's pop-up books for publication by Random House, including books that featured Sesame Street characters. According to Bennett Cerf (in his book At Random), pop-up books were profitable for Random House.^[1] In addition to his collaborations with Christopher Cerf at Random House, Hunt produced pop-up books for Walt Disney, a series of pop-up books based on Babar, and titles such as Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski and The Human Body by David Pelham.^[1][3]

Notable works

Some pop-up books receive attention as literary works for the degree of artistry or sophistication which they entail. One example is STAR WARS: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy, by Matthew Reinhart. This book received literary attention for its elaborate pop-ups, and the skill of its imagery, with the New York Times saying that "calling this sophisticated piece of engineering a 'pop-up book' is like calling the Great Wall of China a partition"^[4]

One of Waldo Hunt's pop-up books for Random House, the 1967 publication Andy Warhol's Index, was suggested by artist Andy Warhol and included photos of celebrities together with pop-up versions of Warholesque images such as a cardboard can of tomato paste.^[1]

See also

• Robert Sabuda

References

Further reading

• The Pocket Paper Engineer, Volume 1 by Carol Barton, 2005
• The Pocket Paper Engineer, Volume 2 by Carol Barton, 2008
• The Elements of Pop-Up by David A. Carter and James Diaz, 1999.
• Paper Engineering: 3D Design Techniques for a 2D Material by Natalie Avella. Rotovision, 2003.

External links

• Pop-Up and Movable Books, A Tour through Their History, The University of North Texas
• The Movable Book Society
• Pop Goes the Book, The University of Virginia Library