Popville

There are nine other videos of this pop-up book shown by adults slowly turning each page and carefully showing. They all last 1.25 thereabouts. Three are in Spanish, those get some discussion. One video is run through a filter so the whole thing displays as a cartoon. One is the official video that adds street sounds with increasing complexity and volume as the pages are turning until it's full on New York sounds at the end. 

I like this video because it's the longest. I like it because the woman is allowing the child to touch it and test its resistance. I like it because it's the only one that shows the book really working to stimulate the imagination like the official video supplies. The boy does not need the added street sounds to help his imagination. 

The thing that got me, though, is unrelated. This is Chinese and I do not know what these symbols mean used in the title.

天小子看立體書Popville

However, a few of them stick right out from Japanese, and I mean jump out. Were this Japanese kanji then I could know what some of them mean, but they're not Japanese, they're Chinese and they say something else. 

The few in the middle really stick out because they were so common. 

立 means "stand" it's used in the place name of the Air Base we lived. My brothers and sisters will not recall this but the symbol along with others was on the sign at the front gate of the base. Tachikawa means "stand river city" The stand understood as one of those stacked stone lamps. The symbol looks like a stand.

子 "child," a common symbol you see this all over the place.

小 "small"

天 "heaven" in kanji

I haven't a clue what the rest of them mean and I haven't a clue what they mean in Chinese, but these four symbols I saw every day and understood them in other contexts.

And then I realized, hey, I have this book. Really, you get like 1.25 minutes of reading enjoyment and that's it. There is no worthwhile pop-up mechanism to figure out, nothing mechanical to read. Owning the book has the same emotional impact as seeing the video once. Unless you're four years old, then three minutes will be filled out with your imagination. 

What? 

No, wait, what? 

I just now checked.  $35.00 for this book. More than that, actually. I was going to make a joke, I honestly expected it to be 1¢.  There goes the recommendation. Too expensive. Sorry. 

I'm going to start checking these more carefully before I pass them off to little bitty kids.