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May 9, 2000 -- The University of Virginia Library invites you to step into the world of pop-up and movable books. Into a world of rivets, spirals, flaps, folds and cut paper, into a world of gifted illustrators, artists, and paper engineers. Here jungle animals spring to life, rockets blast into space, and Columbus arrives again on the shores of the New World. All this is possible by visiting the exhibition, "Pop Goes the Page: Movable and Mechanical Books from the Brenda Forman Collection," opening May 12 and running through August 18 in the McGregor Room in Alderman Library. The exhibit takes visitors back to the 19th century, the heyday of pop-up books, and works its way forward to the renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s. Each page of these imaginative books unfolds into a small theater, where readers become more than mere spectators. There are books covering familiar themes such as nursery rhymes, fairy tales, farmyards and barnyards, the zoo, the jungle, and the seasons of the year; and books about such extraordinary subjects as space travel and encounters with aliens. "From the earliest hand-colored sheets, pasted and cut entirely by hand, to the contemporary use of mechanical die-cutting tools, these works succeed because their transformative capacity moves us from the familiar to the unexpected," said curator Johanna Drucker, U.Va.'s Robertson Professor of Media Studies. Highlights of the exhibition include The Speaking Picture Book (c. 1880s) that plays sound effects -- an impressive accomplishment considering the year in which it was made; The Little Showman Series (1884), a group of four pop-up books that depicts each season with a beautifully illustrated, three-dimensional scene; and Tip and Top and the Moon Rocket (1964), which uses classic pop-up techniques to illustrate an adventure to the moon. Visitors to "Pop Goes the Page" can learn first-hand about the workings of pop-up and mechanical books by operating four models made exclusively for the exhibition by designer Josef Beery and craftsman William Muller, both of Charlottesville. Children and adults are encouraged to use and handle the models, each of which illustrates a different pop-up technique. An interactive Web site accompanies the exhibit, making it available to people around the world. Visitors to the site, located at http://www.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/popup, can manipulate and interact with some of the pop-ups. For example, a Quick Time video shows a 360-degree view of some of the more spectacular books. The site also plays sound from The Speaking Picture Book. These interactive features of the Web site give the viewer the full affect of some of the pop-up books in the exhibition. The Web site will be available May 12. The items on display are part of the Brenda Forman collection. Forman, an avid pop-up book collector who lives in Northern Virginia, began collecting pop-ups in the late 1970s. She said that at the height of her collecting, she "haunted bookstores, pored over mail order catalogs, hunted down pop-up magazine ads, and grabbed pop-up greeting cards." The exhibition is free and open to the public and may be viewed in Special Collections Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with some extended hours. For more information about "Pop Goes the Page: Movable and Mechanical Books from the Brenda Forman Collection," call (804) 924-4966 or visit the Web site at http://www.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/popup. Contact: Melissa Norris, (804) 924-4254 |
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