Books from the exhibition
Exhibition Essays
The Structures of Enchantment - Past, Present and Future by Steve Woodall
The Paper Engineer's Role in the Creation of a Pop-up Book by Andrew Baron
Encoding Enchantment: Engineering the Materials of Story by Maribeth Back
Lothar Meggendorfer, 1847-1925 by Ann Montanaro
Show Me a Story: Children's Books & the Technology of Enchantment
In the SFCB Gallery Aug 20 - Nov 5, 2004
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From Fairy Tales to Moving-Parts Books: In addition to The Wheels on the Bus, I think that the best-known of my books are three fairy-tale adaptations, though I've illustrated a good number of other kinds. If those others aren't as well known, it is probably because the first of the fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel (adapted by Rika Lesser) was named a Caldecott Honor Book; the second, Rumpelstiltskin, was as well; while the third, Rapunzel, won the Caldecott Medal in 1996. These fairy tales and I had long-standing personal connections — from my great-grandmother's painting of Hansel and Gretel and the witch's house that hung over my crib to my playing the title role in a local theater production of "Rumpelstiltskin" the summer that I was 12. The other books include some by writers as well-known as Jack Prelutsky, Beverly Cleary, Avi and Mirra Ginsburg, and more. Fourteen years ago I had the good idea to make a moving-parts book out of the song "The Wheels on the Bus," which I had just learned from my wife (I don't know how I had missed it in Kindergarten). It was tremendously popular, and ever since then people have asked me if I would make another mechanical book. I have always said no—not unless I have another good idea for one. Well, about two years ago "This Old Man" popped into my head, and the song looked different to me than it ever had before. Instead of one old man, I saw different men playing Knick-knack, holding big numbers. Instead of being full-sized, the old men were all tiny; so that whatever playing Knick-Knack might be, it could tickle the funny bone. I started seeing levels of logic in the nonsense, and I felt right away that here was that second good idea I had been waiting for. I had a wonderful time finding possibilities for fun in that song. I devised a simple story about a boy setting out for a walk and made sure that each old man he encountered was a unique character. They came from ten different walks of life, including a Renaissance painter (Old Man #2), a beekeeper (Old Man #5) and a caveman (Old Man #9); then each old man would have his own dog which had to resemble him in some way. It was no trouble finding ten different forms of rolling home, and all of them could be expressed in moving paper. Knick-Knack Paddywhack!, as I decided to call it, was also a counting book and a book about rhyming, which offered many amusing illustrative possibilities. When I started looking for a paper engineer who could help me with my idea, I got recommendations from several people in the pop-up field. Andrew Baron was a name included on all of the lists. I knew that I wanted Knick-Knack Paddywhack!, like The Wheels on the Bus, to be a book with movable parts that act out the movement in its text in interesting ways. I wanted the movement to stay down on the page, like a moving picture, and not to deploy into the third dimension like a sculpture. The sample mechanics Andy sent me were just this sort of mechanics and wonderfully complex. The fact that he lived in Santa Fe, NM, and I live in New York meant that I wasn't sure how our collaboration was going to work. We sort of made it up as we went along. I started by sending Andy rough sketches of how the pages would look. He encouraged me to imagine any movement I could think of, and he would figure out a way to make it happen with the pull of a tab. Or maybe several things could happen with the pull of one tab. Before long I was faxing drawings to him, and he was faxing back responses in the form of other drawings or markings on mine — all of this usually happening in the middle of a phone conversation. We talked over the possibilities at great length, by phone and also by email. Then we started exchanging digital photographs as email attachments, often an old man or his dog in different stages of a proposed motion. Then we learned to turn those still photographs into animated GIF graphics, so we could e-mail moving pictures back and forth. All of these exchanges were more or less instantaneous so that we could almost have been working in the same room — although we were actually over 2,000 miles apart! We spent hours on the phone daily, working out huge numbers of mechanical issues—let's move that bone a quarter-inch to the left, or would that add friction which could buckle the piece on its backward slide? Where on this old man's body should we place a pivot so his saxophone-playing motion would be as expressive as possible, and would he then bump into that old man's moving arm? This went on for a full year, including many weekends and late nights toward the end. Sometimes I invented the mechanism, which Andy would improve and refine. And during this whole time we never met each other. Toward the beginning we did exchange a single photograph of ourselves by email, but Andy's picture didn't stick with me. I felt that he was my good friend without a face. At the end of that year Knick-Knack Paddywhack! was printed and assembled in China. Andy's presence there was crucial to the refining of the moving pieces and making sure that the complicated mechanisms he had designed were assembled in the way he had intended. I needed to be there as well, in case his last-minute adjustments should visibly affect the book, and also to monitor the color printing. So it was that after this full year of (possibly) spending more time with each other than with our own spouses, Andy and I met for the first time in an office of Hua Yang printers in Shenzhen City. Really meeting was a strange experience for both of us, but we found that we continued to work together in just the same way while we were there. Knick-Knack Paddywhack! has turned out to be different from any other book I know. The book features a kind of mechanical inventiveness that I think makes it a 19th century sort of a creature — it's all pivots and levers, and each of the many pieces is placed and glued by hand. But its creation was definitely a 21st century operation. It's not just that it has far more mechanisms in it than a typical movable picture book—in eight spreads there are between 31 and 59 actions, depending on how you count them. Also, the book is composed of more than 190 stamped-out pieces and is assembled using about 270 applications of glue (roughly double a high average glue-point count.) The book is different because it includes so many movements that are intriguing, funny, hard if not impossible to figure out how they work, and which have never been seen in a movable book before. On top of that, I think and hope that all of the mechanical activity doesn't look like ingenuity for its own sake but acts naturally to illustrate the experience of the story and the song, a called-for part of its crazy humor. I'm very proud of how it came out. Paul O. Zelinsky is one of the most original and celebrated children's book illustrators at work today. He lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York. More about Paul at his web site. |
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