Game of Thrones pop-up book examined.

Matthew Reinhart's book Game of Thrones arrived this morning and I must admit to being put off by the price. I want the price to be around $18.00 like normal but this book is over twice that. Is it twice as good? It may be. 

I gruff. I grumble. And I justify the purchase by processing it as education and I payed through the nose for that. I bled for that. It wasn't fair. The cost wasn't worth the product and that's how I justify everything I want. Classify it as education. And it is.

I'll show you what I learned by the first pass through this impressive work. A lengthy photo essay follows. Mostly photos with lines I drew to show what I'm on about because there is a lot of confusing angles and the photos are not always so clear. I'm not showing the book, I'm showing some of its mechanisms, sometimes the back of the pages and under the pages.

I'm delighted to see familiar mechanisms used throughout, in fresh and especially imaginative ways I hadn't considered before and that's how I sense Matthew's genius. Anything I discover by goofing he's already taken and expanded beyond what I thought of and it's fun to see him go go go with it. He's quite mad. 

The first thing I notice is double V mechanisms facing each other throughout. 

This first paired V mechanisms lay two bands straight across the central fold, the V scored into the band, rather than a band glued as a V. It's also elevated on both providing a sort of proscenium and stage area. The two columns on each side connecting them rather than content in the center as usual, say a body that stretches out. This is a building that stretches, showing what is inside. The columns collapse along different scores so that they do not conflict when folded shut.

The virtuosity Matthew puts on display here with various forms of this mechanism is astonishing. He uses it to make buildings, bodies, ghosts, and scary faces.

Game of Thrones

Pop-up book by Matthew Reinhart and Michael Komarck.

Apparently Reinhart is an unstoppable force. His recent Transformers book, itself a tour de force, is a departure from the form that he and Sabuda and have developed over years. That book involved a lot more pull tabs than ever, mechanisms activated by pulling the whole page into a new configuration, the power coming from your fingers pulling the tab. Until then all the mechanisms in all of the books work one way or another by simply opening the page and that is what I like about them.

It's like origami in the sense of self-imposed rule. It restricts but it also forces creativity by strict adherence to canon. Outside that, you're just messing around. I made that up. I don't know. Origami paper is square, I noticed. Rectangular paper will not do. If you use a dollar, then the rectangular shape makes it automatically something else. Something like origami in all respects except its shape of origin, it not being square, so not legal, a bastard origami. That's how I feel about pop-ups that do not work by themselves by the card or the page being opened.

With this new book here again, another departure, the pages do not open as a book but rather as a map of the whole mythologic Game of Thrones space,  So it will take the whole table or whole living room floor to open to full spread. Individual discrete mechanisms positioned on each page that work by you opening the insert, as if a new tiny page built onto its flap portion of the extended map.

I'm not digging the cost, $65.00. Etaiyo!

That's "ouch" in Japanese.  Good thing it's really only $41.00. Phew, a  savings of $24.00. But that's still getting up there, way up there, almost 1/3 of the way up to the cost of a college text book. Preorder for March 25th.