(Written by Salonee Kulkarni)
Deepika Dhiman, a Delhi-based multidisciplinary artist and scholar, can still remember the day her uncle bought her a pop-up book as a present from Boston. The book had three layers that opened in a circular pattern, and 10-year-old her was enamoured as she heard what sounded like sharpening a pencil, smelled fresh wood against a metallic blade and lemon scented white tiles. A book was meant to be read, but here she could actually feel and touch the world it painted.
“The texture, the paper quality, the smells took me to another world. I cannot forget it,” says Dhiman, 40, who studies the intersection of cultural identity, gender, and norms in Indian and Western contexts through autoethnography and visual storytelling.
This is the beauty of pop-up books, which have elements that move, fold out, or lift up as one turns the page, so one does not read them as much as live inside the world for a minute. While AI and the metaverse (the umbrella term for immersive, computer-generated virtual worlds) promise us “immersive” storytelling, let it be remembered that it was achieved with just paper 800 years ago.
Older than the printing press
In fact, the pop-up book predates the printing press itself. While the machine was invented in the 1400s to mass-produce books, the first recorded pop-up book was created in 1240 by an amn English monk named Matthew Paris, who built pivoting paper wheels into a long historical record he was working on called the Chronica Majora. The wheels were called volvelles, and fellow monks spun them to calculate lunar cycles and religious holy days. Historians now consider it the first movable mechanism in a book.
Three centuries later, things got a bit more visceral as a Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius, who is remembered as the father of modern anatomy (the study of the body’s internal structure), used layered paper flaps in his book De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Lift one flap after another and one could watch a body get dissected, layer by layer, in real time without going near a scalpel. Eventually, satirists used the books to mock dictators and parents ended up using it to soothe toddlers.
A weapon against censorship
A girl reads a pop-up book. (Source: Unsplash)
An example of how the books were used for satire come from Czechoslovakia during World War II, when an illustrator Vojtěch Kubašta started making pop-up fairy tales finished in foil and cellophane that were laced with a dark sense of humour that was not really aimed at children at all. His version of Little Red Riding Hood was, underneath the wolf and the woodcutter, a comment on class struggle. The pop-up book was published by Artia, a Czechoslovak publishing house and one of the first in the world to take pop-up books seriously as an art form, and later caught on in the West. An American producer Waldo Hunt saw the potential and built an entire publishing business around the format.
Dhiman, who now teaches her own students to think critically about politics through pop-up satire, does not think that censorship-dodging impulse has gone anywhere. “The threat of political censorship lingers,” she says, “but critical thinking remains central to the course.”
The hidden rule book
One would imagine that something this playful would just be chaos on the page, but it is not so. Dhiman says the form runs on rules borrowed almost wholesale from fine art and photography, things like the “rule of thirds,” a composition technique where the most important part of an image is placed off-centre, roughly a third of the way across the frame, rather than dead in the middle. “There is something strangely comforting in the rules that stand at the intersection of photography and fine art. The terminology is different, but the rule of thirds and colour theory are standardised, despite the form’s history and evolution. The colours used are deliberately contrasted, such as purple and yellow, to draw a child’s attention. If a cow is the story’s main character, it will be positioned in the one-third frame to attract immediate attention,” she says.
Still winning over kids
Walk into the Coforge Public Library in Noida, and you will see that the books remain popular. Over 200 pop-up books, walls painted down at a child’s eye level. Apoorva Rathi, a parent, brings her three-year-old here most weekends. “He likes the sound of the books and the ability to discover something through a flip-flap,” she says. “It is easier to explain concepts like emotions, relationships and feelings. It gives him a window to understand how to process his anger and interact with his newborn sibling. Earlier, he understood inanimate things such as rain, trees, parks and the sky; now he is learning more about abstract concepts like emotions and feelings.”
Of course, kids and delicate paper mechanisms don’t always mix well. Altamash Nizami, who runs the library and holds a Master’s degree in Library Science, conducts orientation sessions for parents, and a printed handling guide to ensure the books are not wilfully manhandled. “Software data helps us pull reports, so we can suggest books to parents based on how often a book has been considered and borrowed before,” he says.
An unexpected therapy tool
Pop-up books have also become a tool in art therapy, specifically for autistic individuals, people whose brains process sensory information, social interaction, and communication differently from the neurotypical norm. “Because autistic individuals have atypical sensory processing, they may experience colours differently, saturated colours can be overwhelming. The book needs to be curated to enhance its functionality, opening up the opportunity to interact with it through sensory play. But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution; what works for one individual may not work for another,” says Dhiman.
The reckoning
With artificial intelligence (AI), computer systems that can generate text, images, and increasingly entire virtual experiences, changing everything, pop-up books, too, have been affected. Dhiman wonders whether AI will finally turn pop-up books into museum pieces.
“Pop-up books are fragile. Any mishap, say a fire, the wear and tear on movable parts like tabs, flaps and delicate strings that can jam from rough handling, can be the end of one. But it is the artistic capacity of the form that will ensure its survival in a technological world,” she says.
(The author is an intern with The Indian Express)
An Alice in Wonderland pop-up book. 
A girl reads a pop-up book. (Source: Unsplash)
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