At a time when a one-dimensional cultural experience just isn`t good enough–when music is going to video, when museums are going hands-on–it was probably inevitable that books would get up and do something, too.
Witness the recent explosion of pop-up books with parts that push, pull, slide, rotate or jump out. Already they have made millions of dollars for a West Coast firm. They were the subject of a recent museum exhibit in New York. They are appearing in bookstores in a ”virtual avalanche,” according to Regina Hayes, an editorial director for Viking-Penguin publishers, the ”pop- up kings,” as she puts it. The New York-based company has 16 pop-up titles to its name.
There are pop-ups for children, pop-ups for adults, and pop-ups intended for children but bought by and for adult readers.
There is ”The Car” book by Ray Marshall and John Bradley, with pop-up rack-and-pinion steering. There is the pop-up ”Human Body” by Jonathan Miller and David Pelham, and its sequel, ”The Facts of Life,” a sort of Gray`s Anatomy of conception featuring three-dimensional sperm, ova and embryo. There is ”The Royal Family Pop-Up Book” with a 10-month-old Prince William who crawls across a rug when a sliding tab is pulled.
There are a pop-up computer book, a pop-up dinosaur book, a pop-up Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan and Noah`s Ark. There are one-trick pop-ups–turn a page and watch a character unfold–and pop-ups that are marvels of graphic engineering. Pull a tab, turn a wheel or lift a flap, and a paper Leonardo da Vinci activates a machine to lift a model of the Church of San Giovanni into the air. The Mayflower, complete with rigging and hoisted sails, sets out from England to Cape Cod. A black cat creeps out from under a toilet seat in a haunted house.
There is an entire industry surrounding pop-ups. ”We do $12 million in business a year,” boasted Waldo Hunt, founder and chairman of Intervisual Communications, a one-of-a-kind pop-up concern in Los Angeles and sort of the General Motors of the industry.
The 10-year-old company conceives and creates its own books and collaborates on others with major publishing companies, including Viking, Random House, Putnam, and Little, Brown. Intervisual has produced nearly three-quarters of the pop-up books in the world, Hunt said.
”We do books in 17 languages that are sold in 30 countries,” said Hunt, 64.
”We are the designated designers of Disney pop-ups. We`ve produced more than 400 titles in the last 10 years. . . . We are in a dominant position in the world market. Anything that can pop up in paper we do.”
His titles include ”The Facts of Life,” ”Sailing Ships” and
”Leonardo da Vinci,” not to mention pop-up board games, animal books and 36 titles on religious themes.
”We can part the Red Sea, and do the nativity,” said Hunt, who began his career in advertising and switched to international printing and publishing in 1960. ”Then we go right down the line: David and Goliath, Jesus feeding the multitudes . . . ”
Intervisual has assembly plants in Mexico, Colombia and Singapore. Part of the key to its success, Hunt explained, is its ”low-cost hand assembly”– and a total staff of 2,000. Eight ”paper engineers” design the books, a feat so intricate that Hunt likens it to ”putting together a piece of electrical equipment. If it`s not properly assembled, it self-destructs.”
Why there is such a market for pop-up books these days is hard to pin down. They are not a new phenomenon: The earliest pop-ups, sometimes called movable books, date to mid-18th-Century England, according to a meticulously researched exhibit of pop-up history on display earlier this year at New York`s Manhattan Laboratory Museum.
Called ”harlequinades,” they were designed with flaps that acted as theater curtains, an effort to look like stage productions of the period. The next pop-up innovations were books with mechanical tabs and dissolving pictures that told classic children`s stories.
Some of these were remarkably complex, engaging and imaginative: The undisputed master of pop-ups even today is the 19th-Century German artist Lothar Meggendorfer, who produced 64 handmade movable books. Some–such as his magnum opus, the 450-piece, six-ring, four-tiered ”International Circus”–
offer such a wealth of color, detail and wit that Intervisual has reproduced them.
The pop-up world was dominated by British and German companies until America`s McLoughlin Co. entered the field in the late 1800s with an elaborately printed theater book. E.P. Dutton became the first publisher to distribute and sell European children`s books in New York City, and toward the beginning of the 20th Century, American publishers began to invent their own books that moved and pushed and pulled.
For financial reasons, World War I brought an end to pop-up publishing.
”Pop-ups may be a sign of prosperity,” said Manhattan Laboratory Museum director Bette Korman in an unusual footnote to American history. ”They are a signal that it is not war or depression.”
So after a period of being ignored and overlooked, pop-up books have unaccountably been reborn.
”I think they are in vogue now because for so long people didn`t realize what charm they have,” maintains Herbert Hosmer of South Lancaster, Mass., a museum curator and antique pop-up book collector in his early 70s whose books comprised most of the New York exhibit. He said he enjoys them ”as much as I did 65 years ago.”
”I think they have universal appeal,” he said, pulling the tabs of a recent acquisition, ”The Naughty Nineties: A Saucy Pop-Up Book for Adults Only.”
”A toy is exciting and a book is exciting, but when they begin to do something it adds something,” he said.
Not everyone is wild about the explosion. Illustrator Martin Provenson, the Caldecott Medal-winning artist who with his wife, Alice, illustrated
”Leonardo da Vinci,” said he is almost offended by what he considers today`s indiscriminate use of pop-ups.
”I simply dislike pop-ups that pop up without any reason,” he said firmly in a telephone interview from California. ”They don`t seem to be connected to the subject matter. If it suits the subject–if it`s an essential part of the pop-up–the idea should call for a three-dimensional statement.
”But I would say that nothing should be made into a pop-up unless there`s a reason, unless there`s some point that would make it vivid. I don`t think a pop-up makes the book more interesting. I think a pop-up that has no point is simply meaningless.”
Hunt, perhaps predictably, disagrees. According to him, pop-ups of any sort have redeeming social value.
”Pop-ups compete favorably with television because of their excitement and interest for children,” he said. ”If children get interested in a book early, they go on to read, and so pop-ups help them get interested in reading at an early age.”
He said the fact that Redbook magazine last year had a pop-up category in its storybook contest points out that ”progress has been made in recognizing pop-ups as a legitimate book form.”
Besides, he noted, pop-ups are fun. ”And we`re all children, aren`t we?” he said.
