Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn

Super Happy Birthday Surprise!

From Fold, Pull, Pop and Turn...

Wishing Sesame Street a Happy 40th Anniversary from the Libraries!  

Sesame Street characters can be found in several of the pop-up and movable book collection at Cooper-Hewitt Museum Library. Here we have Grover’s Super Surprise Book: Featuring Jim Henson’s Muppets from 1978 illustrated by Tom Cooke and paper engineering by Ib Penick.—Jennifer Cohlman

New and Notable...Shakespeare's Globe

Shakespeare's Globe: an interactive pop-up theatre / Toby Forward;  Juan Wijngaard. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press, c2005.

King Lear, Romeo & Juliet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet, and the Merchant of Venice are among the Shakespearean plays that come to life in this interactive pop-up portfolio of the Bard and the Globe Theatre in London.

Shakespeare’s Globe, created by Toby Forward and Juan Wijngaard, features a dramatic pop-up model of the Globe Theater, a twelve-page history the theater, pamphlets containing scenes form notable plays by William Shakespeare, and ten punch-out strips of characters.  Each strip of characters can be placed on the stage as one reads the scenes from a play.—Stephen van Dyk, photos by Elizabeth Broman

New and Notable...Yellow Square

Yellow Square: a pop-up book for children of all ages.  David A. Carter. New York: Little Simon, c.2008. 

David A. Carter , a pop-up book artist and paper engineer living in California, has created more than forty colorful, playful, and awe inspiring pop-up books since the 1980s that include a series that feature bugs—How Many Bugs in a Box?, Love Bugs, Feely Bugs, Halloween Bugs, and Jingle Bugs.  With his One Red Dot, Blue 2, 600 Black Spots, and here with Yellow Square, Carter engages both the child and adult reader in discovering and counting  “hidden” images in the book.    

Yellow Square, containing nine pop-ups that dramatically lift from each page by using string, v-folds, twirling mechanisms, and wheels, is a book that instructs while being an extraordinarily entertaining work of paper engineering. More images can be viewed on the Libraries' flickr site.—Stephen van Dyk, photos by Elizabeth Broman