Press "Enter" to skip to content

Featuring: The model menagerie

Featuring a title from the Libraries' pop-up book collection and current exhibition, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

In the 1890s Nuremburg publisher Ernest Nister created several high-quality, illustrated, and innovative pop-up and movable books. He is best known for refining Dean & Son’s dissolving image slat books by creating pictures with horizontal and vertical slits and developing a device to transform pictures in circular forms. Nister also perfected a way to display multi-layered, three-dimensional scenes so that figures, like the deer and the cage here, seem to lift off and float atop the page surface. As a page is opened, a tab attached to the facing page, allows the layers of figures in the adjacent page to automatically pop-up. These Panorama Picture Books were popular and were widely marketed in England and America by Dutton.—Stephen Van Dyk

The model menagerie: with natural history stories. L.L. Weedon, Evelyn Fletcher, and others. London: E. Nister ; New York: E.P. Dutton, [ca.1895].

 

One Comment

  1. I can’t believe I didn’t know this before now! I grew up on picture books!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *