I’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.
Left: “Call me Ishmael”; right; Ishmael in bed at the Spouter Inn.
The Chase, Third Day.
adult pop-up books
ooh! sounds kinky.
I was at a friend’s house this weekend and noticed on his bookshelf a “pop-up book of nightmares”, which seems like a great idea. I dig the idea of using Melville’s dialogue; but how much of it can he use with such big lettering? I was looking at a pop-up Alice in Wonderland recently which included longish text excerpts, printed in a small font, on cards that were part of the pop-up mechanism. — And still only a small proportion of the original text was present.