Smithsonian Libraries

New and Notable...Shakespeare's Globe

From Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn...

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 Pop-ups & Movables: Yellow Square

From Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn: 

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.—Elizabeth Broman

New & Notable Pop-ups & Movables

From Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn: 

Gloria in excelsis deo. Illustrated by Vojtěch Kubašta. Czechoslavakia: c. 1960.

This double-page pop-up illustrating the Christmas nativity scene was created by Vojtěch Kubašta (1914-1992), a Czech artist and book illustrator. Born in Vienna and raised in Prague, Kubašta began his career as an artist and book illustrator in the early 1940s after studying architecture at the Polytech University in Prague.

His distinctive bold and colorful figures, as seen in this work, became increasingly popular. After the Czech publishing industry was nationalized in 1948, Kubašta began creating advertising materials for Czech products abroad that included three-dimensional cards for items such as Pilsner beer, porcelain and sewing machines. Beginning in the 1950s, he developed elaborate paper construction crèches annually (this being an example) each Christmas season. At this time, Kubašta also designed pop-ups of traditional fairy tales and other children stories (Little Red Riding Hood—1956 being his first) working with the Czech publishing house Artia.

His beautifully designed and intricate pop-ups were later produced from the 1960s-1980s worldwide and became the inspiration for the revival of the pop-up book industry in America.—Elizabeth Broman

Gift of Stephen Van Dyk

New & Notable Pop-ups & Movables

Featured on Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn: New & Notable Pop-ups & Movables from the Cooper-Hewitt Library:

The first movable books for children, developed in England in the 1700s, were harlequinades (stories featuring the comic character Harlequin). Designed to teach a moral, the tale unfolds as a series of flaps are opened.

The Falshood of External Appearances (sic) created in the 1790s in England is a fine example of a flap book called a harlequinade. Also known as “turned up” books, harlequinades were first created by English bookseller and printer Robert Sayer in 1765. They are considered to be the first movable books created for children. Sayer, who originally called these books “metamorphoses,” was inspired by the popularity of pantomime productions of his day. He mimicked the changing scenes of a play with the use of a series of illustrated flaps—that when lifted revealed the next scene of the narrative.  Like the pantomime theater performance, harlequinades often featured the adventures of a clown or harlequin and were often written to teach a moral. Purchased  with the support of the Libraries Special Collections Fund.—Elizabeth Broman

The Falshood of External Appearances, England, ca. 1790