Amazing Pop Up Books

Here at bookfair.org, we make no bones about how much we love pop up books.  If you have not seen a modern pop up book, one printed after 2000, you need to buy one of these books–today.  They will amaze you.  Below is a list of our favorite pop up books.

Our offices are all filled with well-used pop up books from the newest to ones that are quite old.  In fact, we have may pop up books that are more than 100 years old.  Since we had this amazing collection of books at our disposal, we decided to make the internet’s only video library of vintage pop up books.  You can see that library by clicking here.

There are a number of pop up book artists, called paper engineers, who are taking the pop up format to new heights with each release.  The modern pop up book may only be 10 to 14 “pages” long.  Pages is in quotes in the previous sentence because you can scarcely call what is in the book a “page”.  It may be made of paper, but when the paper lifts more than 12 inches out of the book to reveal a mulch-layered scene, can it really be called a page?

The books may contain 7 to 9 principle pop ups, but each pop up page contains smaller pop ups in the corners of the page that tell a story, add dimension to the principle pop up and also amaze the reader.

When you look at one of these books, be sure to look at the book dimensions.  You’ll see that many are about 14 pages, but 1.5 to 2.0 inches thick.  This means that the pop ups in the book are very complicated and will leap–far–out of the book.

With the number of people moving toward e-books, the pop up may seem like an art form that is on a long slow decline.  This is not the case.  People have been handling paper and moveable paper products for hundreds of years.  The modern pop up book is a feat of trial and error engineering, top-shelf illustration and book manufacturing.  We hope that these books continue to experience commercial success as they are really works of art at heart.

Many of the books on this list are time-honored stories like The Little Prince, The Chronicles of Narnia and more.  These books help tell an old story in a new way that is exciting and refreshing.  There are also many books that are informational and highly entertaining.  Books like Encyclopedia Prehistorica and Wild Alphabet instruct just as much as they delight.

A child will love a treasure a pop up book.  Just be sure that you’re not putting one of these books in the hands of a child younger than 3 or 4 years, young hands can rip a pop up book apart in a matter of minutes.