Inside the Pop-Up Studio

In the fairly new book Minders of Make Believe Leonard Marcus includes a history of the Victorian origins of pop-up books. The form has had an amazingly rich history, with great masterpieces for every tawdry throw-away piece. I had my eyes reopened to the possibilities about six years ago in a thrift shop in New York City when amongst the secondhand furniture Carol and I stumbled upon Robert Sabuda's pop-up of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. We were only trying to get pregnant at that point but we bought it up and it is now one of Loretta's favorite books. It's not uncommon to walk past her room and see her sitting on the floor, holding up the (paper) green spectacles while gazing at the Emerald City.

We've gone through a series of his other versions of classics such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Jungle Book. His Winter's Tale, though original, nearly inspired me to specialize in pop-ups and do Shakespearean plays, Cervantes, and similar tales in lavish pop-up form. 

So thanks to the work of people like Sabuda I dare say pop-up books have entered a modern renaissance (see the video I posted a couple weeks ago). So today I'd like to just share a story and video by Gwynne Watkins and Paul Barman from the 4th in which they feature Sabuda and his partner Matthew Reinhart. The video, by Paul Barman, is essentially a tour of one of their new titles on fairies (plus the Oz cyclone Loretta likes to spin so much). It's brief but extremely engaging--as the new genre of online book trailers goes--and even begs a longer film of up to ten or fifteen minutes to really trace the evolution of one of their books from concept to release (note to Sabuda and Reinhart: Call me!).

Hope you enjoy both the article/interview and the video, which are here. Of course there is an official Robert Sabuda website as well, and Amazon obviously has their books for sale. Lastly, there are more vids on YouTube. Here's a sample of a presentation of theirs:

As a housekeeping note, I'll be off until next Monday as I'm at the KidScreen Summit. See you then (or there!).