Fairies and Magical Creatures

By Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda, the book is part of their Encyclopedia Mythologica series, three in the series, Dragons and Monsters, Gods and Heroes, they are all three very good, excellent, each of them $20.00 thereabouts presently, for some reason not sold together as their Prehistoria are, also excellent, especially for boys.

I didn't even know I had this. Mine is new, I must have flipped through it before at least once. I see it there and its title just flat does not interest me. I picked it up and and instantly wanted to rush out of the room and hand it the first little girl I encounter.

Here!

But then I noticed it gets a little dark. It's not all about fairies. The magical creatures get kind of creepy but I am blown away and I mean totally by the mastery demonstrated in this book.

Turn down the sound if you care to look, the music is awful.

Wow. Just wow. Six main pop-up pages, 20 auxiliary pop-up pages, and they are all incredibly imaginative. I see so many books, I have so many, that are one mechanism repeated throughout, sometimes two mechanisms repeated, and there is nothing to them. But Reinhart and Sabuda are known for mind-blowingly complex mechanisms built one onto another. Usually but not always based on a "V" that crosses the central fold, or the central fold displaced, and built onto that, then once built additional "V" built onto the folds created by the additions. 

They mix a lot of devices here.  I see a cantilever device where two arms form a single appendage, one longer than the other and hinged so that when the card is opened the two arms shift and force the attachment to move, its movement controlled by the hinge. Five of those together in a row and the fingers of a hand open up to expose a tiny winged person held in the hand, a separate mechanism. Here, I'll draw the hinged cantilever. 

Well, that's annoying. That mechanism is repeated throughout, more than you'd ordinarily see a thing like that.

There is also a very clever flip book. This is another standard pop-up device whereby turning one page results in five or six pages being flipped as they are attached to each other in increments so that built to flip directly to the last page all the pages between are flipped perforce, a good device for showing transformations, say, from attractive bird holding a piece of cake to a hag holding a plate of mud with sticks in it. Much like Barbara Mikulski offering free medical care to thirty million uninsured Americans. Like that. 

Being extravagant freaks inclined to adding mechanism to mechanism, sometimes reversing so that they flip to fully open presenting a new platform upon which to build they are tempted to create some marvelous pieces of imaginative architecture or other, and because they are built up and away from the page they are built tilting back to offer the the structure at an angle. They are built backwards at an angle, and I do not like that. 

I keep trying to fix them and of course they cannot be fixed, they're made that way. The person in the video does the same thing that I do, tries to adjust the building because it is leaning. 

The very last page, the main pop-up is two sea-horses swing out toward the viewer. It is a spectacular arrangement, two people in the seashell carriage and two horses. I thought it was just my copy and it's driving me nuts, one of the seahorse's legs is printed upside down. 

Hahahahahahahahaha

After all that. 

I'd have to cut it it to fix it. 

It's in the video too, at the very end. The seahorse in front of the woman, has a hopelessly mangled front leg because it's printed that way. 

I fell like such a hog keeping this book to myself. It is outstanding. I'm buying one for the girl down the hall. It seems like a girl book.