Popping Up with Robert Sabuda

If you've been to a bookstore lately, you've seen copies of Robert Sabuda's Winter's Tale stacked high. The initial print run was 250,000 copies, giving evidence of how popular his pop-up art is these days.  Sabuda is a paper engineer, and he talks about his craft in  an article in the Winston-Salem Journal.   I like his point of view:

There's greater attention to children's books now as a backlash to the technology in kids' lives. Parents feel the need to give an alternative to all the media saturation.

The author/illustrator's web site is chock full of information about the art form, including a bibliography and directions about how to make your own.

I was curious about how public libraries handled these books, with their enticing (for little fingers) art work, and in an unscientific survey of five local libraries with good-sized collections, I found that four reserved Sabuda's pop-up books for reference/in-house use only and one carried other Sabuda titles but not the pop-ups.

Comments

[Sarah Louise]

I just went out and bought his latest book for me (an adult). All our copies are reserve/in library use only too. I remember working at Barnes & Noble the year his first book came out. I saw him on the Today show a few weeks ago.

[Susan]

Sarah, I'm going to go look at all of them at my local libe. Sabuda's site is quite generous with advice for would-be paper engineers, but I have trouble even making paper snowflakes. Perhaps I'll get inspired...