Pop-up Book

The term pop-up book is often applied to any book with three-dimensional pages, although it is properly the umbrella term for movable book, pop-ups, tunnel books, transformations, volvelles, flaps, pull-tabs, pop-outs, pull-downs, and more, each of which performs in a different manner. Also included, because they employ the same techniques, are three-dimensional greeting cards

History

This technique was only applied to children’s books in the mid-18th century, when bookseller Robert Sayer created a “lift the flap” book for children about a comic ne’er-do-well named Harlequin in 1765.

The commercial explosion of children’s books came in 1929 with the first Daily Express Children’s Annual, published by S. Louis Giraud. Priced modestly, and produced inexpensively, Giraud pushed pop-ups—which he called “living models”—to a new and mass audience.

The pleasantly deceptive simplicity of the pop-up book was appropriated in the later twentieth century for high-art by figures like Andy Warhol, whose Index Book featured tear-out inserts of a cardboard can of tomato paste (at left) and an inflatable balloon; one can see a similar sense of childish glee in the removable sticker on his famous design for the Velvet Underground’s debut album cover. Tony Award-winning production designer Peter Larkin has also intermittently released selections of a massive pop-up history of burlesque, twenty years in the making, called Panties Inferno.

Hofstra and O’hearn’s designs are of a different stripe, entirely. Like a Frank O’Hara poem come to life, they examine whimsical and odd negative spaces in city scenes, as well as enigmatic structures built upon familiar 2-D landscapes (at left, a spread from All Meadows).They probe the representation of public space, rearranging familiar scenes and urban locales with often beguiling results. The exhibit reveals a full history of the pair’s previous collaborative output, in addition to two new pop-ups created specifically for RARE and a series of nine framed, moveable wall pieces.

A Cherokee Chief in London

Daily Express Children’s Annual No. 2

Sjoerd Hofstra with Karen O’hearn: Books in Motion” is now on view at RARE

Tomato paste

■Assembly
1 Cut and paste your pictures
onto the tabs.
2 Glue your pages together.
3 Create an outside cover.

How to make

Type

Simple Box pop ups

V-Fold pop ups

Box Variation pop ups

180° Box with Closed Top pop ups

Tabletop Floating on I-Beams pop ups

pop up cards with Boxes
Cut Separately

pop up Boxes with
Tabs and Slots

Pop Up Words

X Form pop up cards

■Planning
1 Choose an interesting topic.
2 Keep things simple.
3 Plan the story out.

■Construction and Design
1 Fold a sturdy piece of paper in half.
2 Cut two parallel, horizontal slits in the center of the paper.
3 Make your illustrations.
4 Create as many pages as necessary.
5 Write in the text.
6 Decorate the background for each page.

Test