Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn

Featuring: Animal life in fact, fancy and fun

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

S. Louis Giraud, initially created annual pop-up books while he was editor of children’s books for the London newspaper, Daily Express. In collaboration with paper engineer Theodore Brown, Giraud, after leaving the newspaper, created a series of sixteen annual pop-ups from 1929-1949 under the title Bookano Stories. As we can see in Animal life in fact, fancy and fun, Giraud was a master at creating colorful animal figures that pop-up and can be viewed from multiple angles when the page is opened.—Stephen Van Dyk

Animal life in fact, fancy and fun. edited and produced by S. Louis Giraud. [England]: Daily Sketch & Sunday Graphic, [193-?] Bookano living models series.

Featuring: Robot

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

 Robot is a wonderful example of a multi-action pop-up/movable book where each illustrated, brightly colored page includes flaps, pull-tabs, and other mechanisms. Jan Pieńkowski, born in Poland, worked in England as an illustrator, children’s author, and creator of greeting cards. He has designed more than 17 pop-up books working with some of the most innovative paper engineers of the day—in this case James Roger Diaz, Tor Lokvig, Marcin Stajewski. These engineers and Pieńkowski worked regularly with Wally Hunt at Intervisual Communications—a major producer of pop-ups in the 1980s. Here the robot dramatically lifts off the page surface as the tab is pulled.

—Stephen Van Dyk

Robot. Written and illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski. Paper engineering by James Roger Diaz, Tor Lokvig and Marcin Stajewski New York: Delacorte Press, 1981.

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Featuring: ABC—3D

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

Marion Bataille, a French graphic artist and illustrator who works for the Pompidou Centre and Le Monde, has crafted this clever pop-up/movable book alphabet book. Each letter is represented in diverse ways— a mirror situated on an adjacent page transforms a “v” into a “w”, and a translucent screen superimposed over a page makes an “O" into a “Q”, a “P” into an “R”, an “I” and a “J” share a dot, and many letters pop-up into 3-dimensional forms.—Stephen Van Dyk

ABC—3D. Marion Bataille. New York : Roaring Brook Press, 2008.

Featuring: Bee

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

A bigger than life three-dimensional form of a bee emerges from this small 5 ½-inch book when the carousel mechanism is unfolded. David Hawcock, a paper-engineer for more than 30 titles, has crafted an intricate, colorful, and anatomically accurate representation of the insect.—Stephen Van Dyk

Bee: a read-about, fold-out, and pop-up. David Hawcock and Lee Montgomery. New York: Random House, 1994.

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The Fascinating Art of Paper Engineering ... Installing the Exhibit

Featuring: The model menagerie

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

In the 1890s Nuremburg publisher Ernest Nister created several high-quality, illustrated, and innovative pop-up and movable books. He is best known for refining Dean & Son’s dissolving image slat books by creating pictures with horizontal and vertical slits and developing a device to transform pictures in circular forms. Nister also perfected a way to display multi-layered, three-dimensional scenes so that figures, like the deer and the cage here, seem to lift off and float atop the page surface. As a page is opened, a tab attached to the facing page, allows the layers of figures in the adjacent page to automatically pop-up. These Panorama Picture Books were popular and were widely marketed in England and America by Dutton.—Stephen Van Dyk

The model menagerie: with natural history stories. L.L. Weedon, Evelyn Fletcher, and others. London: E. Nister ; New York: E.P. Dutton, [ca.1895].

 

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Featuring: Animated Circus Book

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

 Julian Wehr, a Brooklyn born illustrator, animated more than 30 books. Like Lothar Meggendorfer, Wehr’s whimsical and colorful characters greatly appealed to children. He improved on Meggendorfer’s pull tab system, so that figures could move side to side as well as up and down on the page surface. In Animated Circus Book, the action-packed world of the circus comes alive as acrobats, clowns, animals, tight-roper walkers, and dare devils twirl, turn, twist and move.

—Stephen Van Dyk

Animated Circus Book. Text by Edward Ernest. Paper engineering by Julian Wehr. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1943.

 

Featuring: Mega-Beasts

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

Paper engineer and pop-up book designers Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart collaborated to create this colorful, action-packed book that includes 35 dramatic v-fold paper constructions with numerous flap and pull-tab mechanisms. On this page, featuring a Mega Sloth, a pull tab- flap turning devise called a waterfall is included in one of the small illustrations. In the waterfall construction, a series of cut-paper figures flip and cascade over each other when the tab is pulled. Mega-Beasts, the third and final pop-up of the Encyclopedia Prehistorica series, includes several scary Ice-Age giants— saber-tooth tigers, huge bears, wooly mammoths, the now extinct dodo bird, and soaring flying lizards.—Stephen Van Dyk

Mega-Beasts. Robert Sabuda & Matthew Reinhart. Cambridge, MA : Candlewick Press, 2007

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Featuring: The Dancing Skeletons Tunnel Book

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn. A perfect entry for Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

Joan Sommers, a Chicago based book designer, has created several tunnel books including Henri Rousseau Tunnel Book and A Sunday on La Grand Jatte Tunnel Book. Made popular as a novelty in the 18th century, tunnel books or peep-shows give the viewer a sense of perspective as several scenes are revealed as the book is fully unfolded. Sommers was inspired in this work by Mexican artist José Guadelupe Posada’s drawings illustrating the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead. In this 16-page tunnel book we see skeletons playfully dancing the fandango, playing music, making tortillas, and courting their lovers.—Stephen Van Dyk

The Dancing Skeletons Tunnel Book/Gran baile de Calaveras, un libro tύnel. Joan Sommers. Spanish translation by Valerie Shull. Chicago: Tunnel Vision Books, 2006.

The Libraries Announces a Series of Pop-Up and Movable Books Lectures

Ellen Rubin, foreground, at the Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop and Turn exhibition opening reception.

In conjunction with our ongoing exhibition in the National Museum of American History, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn, the Libraries is hosting a series of pop-up and movable books lectures. People of all ages are welcome to attend.

Our first speaker is Ellen Rubin, also known as the “Pop-Up Lady.” She will give a talk on Wednesday, November 10, at 12:00 p.m. in the National Museum of American History’s Carmichael Auditorium. Her lecture is titled, “A History of Pop-up and Movable Books: 700 Years of Paper Engineering.” Read her bio below, and stay tuned for more lecture announcements!

Ellen G. K. Rubin discovered pop-up and movable books when she began reading them to her sons over 25 years ago. Today, she has more than 6,500 books and thousands of uncataloged movable ephemera. While at Yale Medical School’s Physican Associate program in 1987, she attended the Sterling Library’s exhibition on the history of movable books. It was there that she learned about the scholarly dimensions of her passion.

Ellen now lectures and writes about her books, conducts workshops, and curates exhibitions. In 2000, she co-curated Brooklyn Pops Up! The History and Art of the Movable Book at the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2005, two exhibitions from her collection were mounted. The first was at the Bienes Museum in Ft. Lauderdale, FL of the work of Vojtěch Kubašta, the Czech artist and paper engineer. Its catalog, with a pop-up, won an ARLIS award. The second was the exhibition, Ideas in Motion: The History and Art of the Movable Book held at the Sojourner Truth Library at SUNY-New Paltz. In 2004, Pitspopany Press published Ellen’s The Hanukkah Puzzle Book: A Book in Eight Parts for Eight Days of Fun! Ms. Rubin has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show, CBS Sunday Morning, and Japanese Public TV presenting the history of pop-up books from her collection. She is a charter member of the Movable Book Society and writes for their newsletter and is a member of the Grolier Club. Ellen hosts her website, The Pop-Up Lady. to disseminate information on the subject.

—Liz O'Brien

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