Popping Up Again
“In the mid-1960s American Waldo Hunt, President of Graphics International, a Los Angeles-based print brokerage company, was creating dimensional pop-up magazine inserts and premiums. Hallmark Cards purchased Graphics International at the end of the decade and the staff moved to Kansas City, Missouri. With more than forty successful titles produced for Hallmark, Hunt left in 1974 to return to California where he began a book packaging company, Intervisual Communications, Inc.
Today there are a number of packaging companies such as Compass Productions, White Heat, Ltd., Van der Meer Paper Design, Sadie Fields Productions, and Designamation to name a few, and the number of pop-up books has grown tremendously. There are between 200 and 300 new pop-up books produced in English each year. The publication of pop-up books is production involving the skills of a number of individuals.
Paper Engineers
The creation of the book begins with a concept, story line and situation. Once the basics are worked out, the project goes to the “paper engineer” who takes the ideas of the author and the illustrator and puts motion into the characters, and action into the scenes. They may even add sound, as in a book where the opening and closing of the pages cause the teeth of a saw to run across a log.
The paper engineer’s task is to be both imaginative and practical. The designer must determine how movable pieces attach to the page so they won’t break, which points need glue and how much, how long pull tabs should be and how high a piece can pop up. The final step for the paper engineer is to lay out or “nest” all the pages and pieces so they fit onto the size sheet that will be run through the printing press.
All contemporary pop-up books are assembled by hand most in Colombia, Mexico, or Singapore. After printing, the nesting pieces of a book are die-cut from the sheets and collated with their pages. Production lines are set up, with as many as 60 people involved in the handwork needed to complete one book. These people fold, insert paper tabs into slits, connect paper pivots, glue and tape. Alignment of tip-on pieces with the printed page must be exact and angles must be precise. The most complex books can require over 100 individual handwork procedures.
The movable books of the last two decades have become increasingly complex with sophisticated pop-up illustrations and intricate mechanical devices. The addition of lights and music in some titles has contributed to the surprise of the mechanical illustrations. Pop-up and movable books are not ordinary books. For more than 100 years their ingenious mechanical devices have surprised and entertained readers of all ages.
Modern Engineers
Some of my favourite modern engineers in this medium include Ken Ishiguro (his was the light in the clip), Ingrid Sikikus who published a book of her pop-ups Van Gebouw tot Kaart ‘From Building to Card’, featuring her original designs of famous buildings in The Netherlands and Belgium, it’s just beautiful. My most favourite piece is The Colosseum followed closely by her bisschoppelijk paleis astorga because of its lovely simplicity.
Matthew Reinhart
Other engineers include Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart. The latter receiving a great deal of attention. It’s said that ‘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”.
Art was always a huge part of Matthew’s young life. Drawing pictures and making crafts were his favorite activities, in school and out. Matthew drew whenever and wherever he got the chance. His school notebooks often had more drawings in them than notes! He loved drawing and reading about all creatures and animals so much, he drew them everywhere!
Dinosaurs, like about every kid on the planet, were his absolute favorite to draw and Matthew could rattle off the name of every single one before learning to add or subtract. As he got older, Matthew was captivated by the movie Star Wars. The richness of the universe George Lucas created on the screen fueled his young imagination, inspiring countless sketchbooks filled with monsters, spaceships, and action heroes.
“Like most Doctors’ children, his father convinced him to study biology to prepare for medical school. College life at Clemson University was busy and fun for Matthew, but he was never really satisfied. Medicine was not his true calling. Along with his required biology courses, Matthew snuck in a few art classes, and built up a bit of a portfolio. After graduating Cum Laude from Clemson, he took a year off before medical school and moved to New York, where he met Robert Sabuda and they began doing volunteer work together.
Robert Sabuda
Robert’s book, Christmas Alphabet had just released to rave reviews, and he persuaded Matthew to follow his calling by attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. With his parents’ blessing and support, Matthew enrolled as an industrial design (with a concentration in toy design) student the following year. Pratt was an eye opening experience for him, though his initial dreams of being a toy designer soon transformed into paper engineer with Robert’s help after working with Robert on books like ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’, A B C Disney and Movable Mother Goose.
Matthew made his first big break into the pop-up world with The Pop Up Book Of Phobias. Other books followed, including both collaborations with Robert Sabuda and including their trilogy of Encyclopedia Prehistorica books and renowned illustrator Maurice Sendak on the New York Times best-selling Mommy Solo pop-up projects like: The Ark, Animal Popposites, The Jungle Book, Cinderella and his dream-of-all-dream projects, Star Wars: Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy. He continues to work and live in New York City with his partner Robert Sabuda, cutting, taping and folding paper into pop-up masterpieces.”
I hope you explore this fascinating art form and world further, it really is fascinating and engages children of all ages not to mention those older ones still young at heart.
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