Actually, all pop-up books are manufactured by hand. Somebody physically folds and glues every single piece into every single pop-up book that ever existed ever. I collect antique books, antique pop-up books. Some of them have pull tabs on them and, instead of a little plastic rivet, like we use today, little teeny wire coils so that you can pull it and something will move.
I had one from like 1840. So I look at that and I think, somebody hand assembled that in 1840, put those pieces in, and hand colored the pages that are on the book, which fascinates me. That tradition continues today &3151; all pop-up books are made by hand overseas. They’re not done in the United States. They’re made mostly in South America and in Asia. I’ll go over to China or to Thailand, or someone from my studio will go to oversee that production.
We design and create the pop-ups, and we make flat drawings of all the pieces. Every pop-up book has all these pieces that are made, little pieces to it. We make them on the computer. They’re called die lines because they’ll be used to make a die, which is like a cookie cutter that will stamp out all the pieces for the book.
We send the die lines to the manufacturer overseas. They build this big die mold, this big block of wood with all these cookie cutters in it. Then the printed pages press on until all the pieces are cut out. All those pieces are counted. Somebody counts 500,000 pieces for dinosaurs. They count them. They go into the hand assembly room. That room is unlike anything you will ever see in your life.
It’s an enormous room that has like 1,000 hand assemblers in it. They all sit at these long tables and all they do are assemble pop-up books. Each side of the table is responsible for just one pop-up or one page in the book. That side of the table or that table becomes the experts at making that one particular pop-up. Like the T-Rex head from Dinosaurs, somebody will put the teeth in, somebody will put the tongue in and hand it to the next person, and then they’ll put the sides of the head on and they’ll hand it to the next person.
It will go all the way down the row of people, and at the very end there will be a finished T-Rex head. Then they’ll hand it across the table and somebody will glue it to the page, and somebody will glue the arms on. All they’ll do is make like a million T-Rex’s for the book. The pages will be all glued together by hand. Then somebody will glue the cover, the boards — that even gets glued into the book by hand. They’re very quick at it.
They assemble so much faster than we do at my studio it’s not even funny. They can make like 25,000 books in a week, which is a lot of books. But, fortunately pop-up books have become very popular. ISo if they have a print run of 500,000 books, 25,000 doesn’t sound like a lot. You’re obviously taking months and months and months to get all of those books finished and completed.
