md_popup_cover.jpgI’m a big fan of the pop-up books created by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart. My favorites are Sabuda’s adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Clement Clarke Moore’s The Night Before Christmas and Reinhart’s Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy and Mommy? (with a story by Maurice Sendak.How delightful then that his apprentice) and his

Last November, Sterling Publishing brought out Moby-Dick: A Pop-Up Book, created by Sam Ita, who studied graphic design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and apprenticed for five years with Sabuda and Reinhart, working on pop-up titles such as America the Beautiful, Encyclopedia Prehistorica, and Mommy?. He’s created some fabulous Christmas cards for the Museum of Modern Art too.

Ita retains Melville’s dialogue and dramatizes some of my favorite scenes. Here’s a taste, though no 2-D picture can really convey what it’s like to open the book and see the Pequod popup up from its pages.

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Left: “Call me Ishmael”; right; Ishmael in bed at the Spouter Inn.

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Ahab on the quarter-deck.

md_popup_wreck.jpgThe Chase, Third Day.

Highly recommended if you’re a fan of either Melville’s novel or adult pop-up books!