The first Noël, like many pop-up and movable books, was created to celebrate the holiday season.
Category: Exhibitions
In the 1950s-1960s, Vojtěch Kubašta, an Austrian-born paper engineer and illustrator working in
Czechoslovakia, created a series of pop-up adventure and fantasy stories combining bold folk art style imagery, distinctive colors, and innovative cut and folded paper styles. Some of his large-scale constructions of this period include Marco Polo (1962), The tournament (1950s), and Ricky the Rabbit (1961).
Wow!: The pop-up book of sports is featured in the Libraries’ current exhibition highlighting innovative book design, Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn, which is on display in the Smithsonian Libraries Exhibition Gallery, National Museum of American History, first floor west, through September 1, 2011.
Vojtěch Kubašta was born in Austria and was raised in Prague where he first studied architecture before pursuing a career as an illustrator and paper engineer.
Numbers or Roly Poly Numbers is a pop-up version of a leporello (a book that folds out in an accordion-like manner). A small brightly-colored cube is opened by pulling apart one side to reveal a small pop-up figure in a smaller cube. The process continues as ten cubes— each with a number of figures ranging from one to ten— are exposed.
As we can see in Animal life in fact, fancy and fun, Giraud was a master at creating colorful animal figures that pop-up and can be viewed from multiple angles when the page is opened.
Robot is a wonderful example of a multi-action pop-up/movable book where each illustrated, brightly colored page includes flaps, pull-tabs, and other mechanisms.