Revisiting the magic of pop-ups

Pop-up books have long captivated children, and for good reason, writes Jane Sullivan in The Age.

THAR SHE BLOWS! The great white whale rears up out of the sea, scuppers the Pequod and sets up a whirlpool that takes the sailors down to their watery graves. And to help them on their way, you can pull a tab that turns the whirlpool around.
Yes, it's Moby Dick: A Pop Up Book, Sam Ita's graphic novel based on the Herman Melville classic, bristling with old salts and Pacific gods and enough nautical detail to launch an entire fleet. What a splendid addition to a grand tradition that reaches its peak at Christmas time.
Like many adults, I've always had a soft spot for the pop-up book, and I joyously wrecked many of them as a child in the enterprising spirit of finding out how they worked.

One of my treasured possessions for many years was the Fungus the Bogeyman Plop Up Book, by Raymond Briggs, full of three-dimensional slimy things.
But pop-up books - or to use the wider term, moveable books - weren't always for children. The origins of books with moveable parts go back to medieval times, and they were used in astrology and anatomy. Alive, one of the pop-up books in the shops at the moment to illustrate the human body, is part of a very ancient tradition. A few modern writer/artists such as Barbara Hodgson carry on the form for adult readers.

Pop-ups began to instruct and entertain children in the 19th century, and the prolific and popular German pop-up artist Lothar Meggendorfer wrote a little rhyme gently warning his young readers to take care with the fragile parts "Lest Woe and Grief arise".
The most recent revival of the art was in the 1990s, and today, fairies, doll house theatres, dragons, sharks and dinosaurs are popping up everywhere, from the simplest to the most elaborate forms. But how can they hold their own against the allure of moving images on video games and DVDs?
One answer comes from Robert Sabuda, the king of the modern pop-up artists - or paper engineers, as they like to call themselves - who has created many books with his partner Matthew Reinhart in their New York studio. Parents like pop-up books, he says, precisely because they are not a part of the electronic world.
You can enjoy them anywhere and you don't need to plug them in.
People also love the surprise of not knowing what's going to be on the next page, he says. They turn the page and go "Wow!". They are really affected by the magic of a pop-up and amazed that they have the power to make it happen by turning the pages.
It's not always strictly pop-up, but another very popular kind of moveable book at present is full of flaps, doors, tabs, envelopes, paper scraps and foldouts.

These books often purport to be the journals of explorers or archaeologists discovering secret, wonderful and horrible things.

So you can discover the boy king's body in The Search for Tutankhamun, by Nikki Horin; or travel in time with Einstein's daughter and your own backward-running pocket watch in Ed Masessa's The Time Traveler's Journal; or give yourself nightmares with Edgar Wishbone's World of Monsters, which is as vivid, visceral and explosive as any grisly-minded child could desire.
Handle these books with care: a lot of craft has gone into them. Sabuda says the design of one of his books can take up to eight months, and creating the art to go onto the pop-up pieces can take up to a year. The hardest part? To get the book to pop shut.