MOVABLE II
New Movables and Pop-ups from the Frankfurt Book Fair 2002 Theo Gielen The Netherlands
Late last summer, about the time I started to prepare for my visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair, I met a new collector of movable and pop-up books. With great enthusiasm he talked about his purchases and showed me books that proved to be almost exclusively what the experienced collector would view as very simple, hardly collectable books. They had simple movements usually produced for toddlers. Nevertheless, his pleasure in these books, the twinkle in his eyes when he played with them, and the "discoveries" he made when thinking of the intended the use of mechanics for the development of the child, made me realize how spoiled we have become by the wealth of the luxurious output of the last 20 years, the "second golden age." Apparently I have overlooked the functional uses of movable and pop-up mechanisms in children's books while focusing on the spectacular effects that these mechanisms can have. I am always searching for new techniques invented by paper engineers. So, when I started to study the fall production of the publishers listed in Bookseller, Publishers Weekly, Bérsenblatt, etc, I saw that the enduring economic recession is still causing the publishers to reconsider bringing out the rather expensive pop-up books. As a result, I decided this year to be more attentive to the way mechanics have been used for educational purposes in books for young children. To my surprise, such books proved not only numerous, but also, in their mechanical simpleness, mostly cleverly designed, well-considered, innocent, and effective. They are educational tools with a good eye for the learning and motor needs of a child.
Movable books for toddlers It proved remarkable how many books published for young children use movable and (or in combination with) pop-up elements for educational purposes. They are remarkable not only for their clever use of mechanical elements shown, but also for the ingenuity in the choices of adequate mechanics and the effectiveness of the results. Just a selection of this year's output will follow.
VOLUME 11 NUMBER 1 FEBRUARY
2003
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First, of course, there are the books that help to develop the basic language skills, naming and relational thinking. My First I 100 Words Book (Intervisual) with pull-tabs and flaps and Doras Book of Words / Libro de Palabras de
Dora (Simon & Schuster, 0-689-85626-1) are good examples. Robert Crowther's Shapes (Candlewick and Walker), is a pop-up concept book with blank, shaped pages
that transform into an explosion of familiar objects of the same shape by pulling tabs and lifting flaps. Another example is Halloween Colors: A Turn the
"he
INCH
Pops
Flap Book by Carla Dijs (Cartwheel). In Ellie & Pinkys Shapes Book: A Pop-up Book
(Intervisual) children learn to ty identify basic shapes by cute (Dr. Seuss small pop-ups on every spread combined with simple math increasing in number as the child counts the number of each shape on every page. There are other counting books like Fun to Learn I 2 3: A Kaleidoscope Book (Bookmart Editions, UK) and Carla Dijs's Up Pop the Monsters 1-2-3 (Cartwheel), reprinted in an enlarged edition. The nonsense rhymes of Dr. Seuss The Grinch Pops Up! (Random House) plays with the sounds of language.
The emotional development young child is oper strengthened by books like At ae Hooper Has Lost his Owner by Own Marsha White (Little Brown, 0316-06561-7), a pull-tab book with pop-ups that give a child the feeling of belonging to and being loved by his family. A child experiences feelings of coping with fear in these books: Snappy Little Monsters by Derek Matthews (Templar, ), Kees Moerbeek's You Monsters are in Charge A Boisterous Bedtime Pop-up (Simon & Schuster, 0-689-84675-4), and In the Dark, Dark Wood, with strong graphics by Jessica Souhami (Frances Lincoln, 0-7112-1540-5).
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