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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The Paper Engineer's Role in the Creation of a Pop-up Book
Simply put, the paper engineer is the one who puts the "pop" in pop-up. There aren't more than two or three dozen professional pop-up-book paper engineers worldwide. They labor in obscurity, because most people don't realize that someone actually has to work out every little fold and tuck — all of the elaborate mechanics that go into every pop-up book. It is the job of the paper engineer to look at the illustrator's rough pencil drawings and devise paper mechanisms that will give the most interesting movable actions and the most appropriate three-dimensional forms. Sometimes the illustrator has specific ideas about what kind of movement each feature should have. At other times the paper engineer makes these decisions, but usually it is a combination of both the illustrator's and the paper engineer's ideas that end up being designed into the finished book. By far, the fun part of the job for the paper engineer is during the early stages of the project, bringing life, dimension and movement to the illustrator's drawings. This is where the paper engineer gets to be an inventor. After the rough working mechanics are created, each new pop-up or pull-tab design goes through many stages of refinement to improve its action and reliability. No matter how complicated an action or structure appears to be, a pop-up book is entirely created from an assortment of basic paper folds and devices, which can be combined in various ways to suit the needs of a particular piece of art. Although a paper engineer's tools consist of rulers, circle templates, X-acto blades, scissors and glue, the most important tool that a paper engineer can have is imagination. From this magical place comes the inspiration for how to apply the intricate paper designs that may enable a freewheeling professor to roll toward you on his unicycle, or make a room full of musicians play their instruments all at once when you pull a single tab. Most pop-up books require several months to more than a year to develop from the artist's first drawings into a fully functional, working color sample. At this point, a detailed set of paste-ups is created that go to the color separator for careful preparation of the materials to be printed. Then the scanned press materials go to the printer. The printer not only prints the large "running sheets" that the book is made from, but also prepares the big steel dies that stamp out the book's pages from the running sheets, and all the little paper parts. Just as there are a small number of paper engineers around the world, there are also very few printers who manufacture pop-up books. Each and every pop-up book must be hand-made -- there are no machines that can assemble complicated books. Therefore, the printer must also train an assembly team in the individual construction -- the folding and gluing -- of each new book. It's an amazing process, and the result is one of the last hand-made, mass-produced products that you can buy. One of the featured books in this exhibition, Knick-Knack Paddywhack! required five hundred dedicated workers, in ten teams of fifty assemblers, to construct the 200 separate pieces into each new copy of the book. More than 23 million individual assembly steps were carried out to fulfill the first printing order. Knick-Knack Paddywhack! continues the more than century-long tradition of sophisticated and entertaining pull-tab books, as characterized by Lothar Meggendorfer's Lebende Thierbilder (Ca.1885). As you will see in this exhibition, pop-up and movable books have a rich history that inspires both individual book artists and active paper engineers to create new and exciting designs for the present, and into the future. Andrew Baron is widely regarded as one of the world's top paper engineers. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. |
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