The large garage door lifted and I walked under it and out like a king except onto an alley facing a parking lot and right off caught glimpse of little brown bunny tucking under a parked vehicle woefully displaced in this urban parking lot. At nine thirty looked up to a blue sky and saw the moon up there like a tiny round cloud just waiting to be noticed by somebody. A woman walking in front of me noticed. "Hey, look at the moon."
So I did.
Visitors to the U.S. remark, "Boy, they sure do like their flag. And we do. But not any more than the person saying that. It's just they haven't noticed the same thing in their own country. And if that were uniquely true about Americans as they suppose then these balconies would be covered with flags, and you see only one. Right in the middle.
My sky. I feel so ensconced.
I decided to read a book about when America was great. Won't take long, it's a pop-up book.
When was America ever great? A provocative unhappy person asked that on Twitter.
We could say, maybe back in 1979 when this book was published. When the country was united in a single project. Except for the people against the project, the people who protested spending all that money on space, mostly Democrats, and insisted better use can be made of it right here and who considered the entire program one gigantic corporate welfare project on an industrial scale. Back when civil rights was a wrenching national issue. When feminism really took hold. Back when free sex opened the door to AIDS. Back then when both parents working and latchkey kids became the norm, during that period of lynchings and riots and anti-war unrest. The golden years when America was great. A nostalgia developed for those less trying times.
A time when even pop-up books were simple. V-mechanism, V-mechanism, V-mechanism. Except for the pod. We could make this whole book easily in our first class. I'm not knocking it, I'm describing it and encouraging your own abilities.
I saw Obama posters in the windows one time but never any American flags. The business across the street will have a whole block with a line of American flags in a row, but not on the people's balconies.
Let's look at this book so you'll know how to appreciate it when you're reading it to your grandkids and they're sticking their little fingers into it exploring its details. Your impulse will be to say, "Don't touch," but they must.
The cover of the book is annoyingly and expensively in the shape of a slice of cake. This was important to the author, Pelham knows the novelty of the book's shape is important to children, but it is disliked by everyone else. It added ridiculously to cost of production. I'm assuming. It's a mess on the bookshelf and must be set aside by itself. I removed the offending cardboard panel that forms the puffed up shape and by doing destroyed the cover of my copy but at least it behaves like a book and it fits on a shelf properly with no further special attention. Had I known back then that the price for used copies would be so high now I would have rethought that decision. Presently lowest is $21.00 + shipping and I doubt I paid nearly that much. Abebooks has one lower presently. I should buy it just to pass to these two little kids who live here.
Bought it. Now I'll have two copies. One in the shape of a cake to give away. They'll love it. I don't even know them, hardly see them around, very quiet, but I know that they're going to love this little book. Now I can't wait. I already have planned how through 3rd party the little book can be given without causing any alarm.
Other than its unfortunate cover it is a tight little book. Most mechanisms are simple and one per page but a lot of action is packed into each one. Each little thing is loaded with mouse-art. Individual mouse characters in costume within the pod of little mice are established early and maintain throughout. The story is simple A to B and told in simple clips one to the next. Children will realize early what is happening to the group of mice and see for themselves what the mice do not see; the cake diminishing on its way to the party. Gripping drama right there for kids. Children paying attention will know that no cake will be left.
The opening page we see right off the subject will be a dessert plate of cake of interest to mice in their bedclothes.
The first page of story action a postman-mouse delivers a letter. The text is ballad in iambic lines that rhyme telling a story about a mice adventure of carrying a slice of cake across a harrowing landscape fraught with dangers to attend an important family birthday party at a nearby farm, a great distance for mice. Not much is going on the page, when you open the door yourself the whole group of mice pour out. The postal letter is a big deal for mice.
They're mice. Too young. Can't read. The postman-mouse reads the letter to them.
"Why certainly," the Postmouse smiled;
"Now let me see… ah yes…
From four till eight, and don't be late.
Please come in fancy dress."
This clever page of the human party in action is for adult enjoyment. It shows a woman slumped into a chair with her legs crossed carelessly, it's been a hard party, she can't take the sugar and she slides the plate under the chair while her other arm lifts a drink to her mouth, her face flips with the cup now in front of her face as if hiding her face conceals the act of ditching the cake. This is how the mice get the cake. It was put there on the floor by a woman who just doesn't care about proper uneaten cake plate placement.
The mice take the cake off the plate, have a few bites, and slip past the cat and through the cat flap.
In the dark woods the housemouse kids encounter woodsmouse who offers personal guidance through the woods and the night. At dawn on the next page the woodsmouse hacks off a piece of cake as payment for his services.
The housemouse children notice an advertisement and take up at a bed and breakfast. The B&B served them their own cake for breakfast. Refreshed, they hit the road and notice their load is lighter. The group encounters a fieldmouse that offers to show them the way. She guides them through her field and then sits down and asks them, now, "what's for tea?" She has bug juice for their picnic and suggests the mice contribute cake. The video does not show the wooden gate open. Too bad. Little fingers would reach in to flip the gate, to see, but this book reviewer is not interested, he flips right past, had he shown then we'd see the front detail of all the mice characters and there is a lot of detail in their "fancy clothes," it shows another mouse turning with the gate as a hinge itself, and it shows the deep focus of the picnic bug juice tea party in the background, an before/after, climb the gate, then the party, both shown at once. double page, but the reviewer does not show this eloquent touch of non-pop-uppery.
The housemice meet the Churchmouse vicar.
This tiny book is British as hell without even trying; different specific types of mice identified by location, house, field, church, cat flap, bug juice for tea, vicar. Where you expect the churchmouse to take his tithe of the cake instead the vicar absolves the housemice of guilt and comforts them in their slow realization their cake is already gone. He is sure the Lord will provide for He works in mysterious ways.
The last pop-up page is largest double page denouement with cast collected and with new characters and deus ex machina grandmum mouse upon the scene with heavenly solution of a fully prepared cheesecake that takes center stage. Whoever would have thought of that, a cake made of cheese?
The economy in the pop-ups with its loaded art content is impressive. I would like to tell a tight story like this to my nephews in this form. For such a tiny small-person's book it sure packs a lot into it. This last page has an element I've not seen anywhere else, a bit of origami, a small V pillar mechanism folded in half and doubled to form the body of a mouse in a clown suit bent at the waist that looks for all the world like it is sitting on the edge in the crack between pages and hangs its legs over the edge toward the viewer. That little mouse origami could be inserted similarly into nearly any correspondence to very good effect.
The video is best muted. Sound makes it much worse. I have strong mixed feelings about this video and about this pop-up book. I had the book first, for a long time since it came out, and the video only just now. I wish they would knock it off with the "this land is your land" b.s. and state the truth, this land is their land and our visits support their barony over which they rule as their own private property and we are kept out at the drop of a dime while they reserve large portions, the best portions, for their own exclusive use. If you don't believe me, join them, you'll become one yourself instantly and enjoy these property related benefits for yourself. It's all very Communist-minded and so is the pop-up book and so is this video and so is the song they selected to represent their work. So then mute.
The artwork is like the postcards from Wyoming paint-by-number look with rigid unblended shadowing vectored line illustrations. Vector drawing is lines made by points, curves mathematically calculated between points for images that are readily resized by computer.
Five of the six layouts rely on the same basic mechanical idea of a long broad background, a long flat V nearly flattened out entirely but sill a V and one that works to flip up and that defines the whole scene along with the two flat pages of the book, and that drag up with them attachments that fill out the scene. One after another this same idea of panoramic broad V background. But what else can the collaboration do to put viewers into the scene? The exact same thing occurs with another excellent book with different artwork Birdscapes, very well researched and with stereo audio sound to help identify the birds. Educational for people interested in birds for matching sight to sound. But a disappointment nonetheless for pop-up enthusiast used to likes of pop-up engineers Sabuda and of Reinhart who would have racked their brains to avoid repeating structural mechanisms like this. While like those two innovators they do manage extra pop-up mechanisms of card size inserted as tiny books in the areas left blank by the predominant mechanism and scenery, and contrary to those two innovators by including tiny booklets that fill blank spaces that are loaded with text and not loaded with pop-ups that would tell the story or suggest what the text does.
The thing about pop-ups is you needn't explain everything.
If Muir is so important to America's National Parks then he deserves his own pop-up page, not some blurb about him. I object to all the non-pop uppery that forces me to read.
All those words all over the place, even some double pages with no pop-up at all, just words and regular silk-screens of photos, and reading through my postulate about their barony impulses is confirmed as I got farther and farther in descriptions of national parks that are not displayed in pop-up form, so much valuable real estate held in their custody, park after park, Death Valley, Channel Islands Crater Lake, fifty-eight national parks before any mention of a single state. Finally Ohio. Finally Washington. You'd have no idea from the book even with a splendid pop up that shows it, the Everglades is in Florida, or that Smokey Mountain National Park borders Tennessee and N. Carolina, You can look and read all you like and not learn from this book that Grand Canyon National Park is in Arizona although you will know it has something to do with Colorado River. You will learn from text accompanying a dioramic pop-up that the world's first national park is Yellowstone but the book will not tell you the park is in the state of Wyoming. And so on, Glacier National park belongs to the Park Service, belongs to you and me, and we can see the goat right there in the middle on the continental divide and we see the unique bus that take people around if you can only find out for yourself somewhere else and not from this book that first you must go to the sovereign state of Montana. They manage to say so much by what they achingly omit. The book and this video advertise their own attitude that they maintain toward this land they insist in song is made for you and me.
The book is worth it. Recommended.
Several offers on Amazon. They offer the best deal, even better than Abebooks, and it's not that great a deal. Still expensive for a pop-up book. The used books are treated as collectables. One place is asking $70.00. Al the rest about $30.00.
I like my copy. Although I didn't learn any pop-up techniques and I didn't learn anything useful about national parks, it's still nice to have, not everyone feels so sour as I, and children will like this book too.
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.
