The Great Menagerie: Twentieth Century

S. Louis Giraud: Daily Express and Bookano Stories

Pop-ups experienced a renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks to S. Louis Giraud in London. While editor of children’s books for the newspaper, Daily Express, Giraud produced a pop-up annual by the same name. After he left the newspaper, he continued the series under the title Bookano Stories, which ran for seventeen years. His books were referred to as “living models” because each scene unfolded in a double-page spread, which was designed to be viewed from multiple angles. Another attraction, according to Peter Haining in his Movable Books, was that “not only did the figures stand up as the pages were opened and closed, the figures appeared to continue their movements” after the book was opened.

A black book cover contining an illustration of a red haired boy riding a donkey. Under that is an illustration of a little boy sitting in front of an open book with a vortex in the middle of it and an animal coming out of it.

A book cover containing an illustration a king and queen riding a fancy carriage with golden cloth on the sides. Inside the carriage with them are also three children. The title is at the top of the book.

Blue Ribbon Publishing and Harold Lentz

Blue Ribbon Publishing and paper engineer Harold Lentz teamed up in the 1930s to produce a successful series of imaginative pop-ups. Many of the books’ colorful characters were inspired by the recent popularity of Walt Disney animation. Notably, Blue Ribbon was the first publisher to market their books using the term “pop-up.”

A book cover containing an illustration of a grey cat standing up, wearing a blue outfit and red boots while holding a rabbit upside down in one hand. The cat stands on grass that is on the bottom right corner, the title inside it.

A pop-up of a book. The pop-up is of Santa Claus standing in a doorway on the left with his gift bag on his back. On the right Rudolph is sleeping peacefully in his bed. A sign above it reads Home Deer Home. Under the pop-up the page has some text.

Voitech Kubasta

Voitech Kubasta was an artist for Artia, a state-run import/export company in Prague, which marketed books through Bancroft and Company of London. Kubasta, an architect by trade, began experimenting with paper in the 1950s. He combined his talent for paper engineering with an interest in fairy stories to create an estimated seventy pop-ups for Artia in the 1950s and 1960s. Artia distributed thirty million copies in thirty-seven languages of Kubasta’s popular creations.