The stories included in the Shahnameh are over a thousand years old—but did you also know that Hamid Rahmanian’s pop-up book versions of two of those stories use some technologies and traditions almost as old as the tales themselves? That’s right: The Seven Trials of Rostam and Zahhak: The Legend of the Serpent King are part of an artistic tradition of movable books that goes back at least to the mid-thirteenth century, with the English Benedictine monk Matthew Paris’s history of the world, Chronica Majora. Parts of his book were intended to help his colleagues determine the dates of holy days. This sort of liturgical calendar functioned through the use of volvelles—overlapping wheels held together by connecting their common center on a page—what the Museum Wales calls “early paper calculators.”
The museum tells us that volvelles may have first been used in the Middle East as early as the eleventh century as part of texts dealing with medicine and astronomy; a Stanford Library article suggests instead that they “were tools for divination.” Whatever their origins, if you’ve used a cardboard star chart to help you find and identify constellations, you’ve used a volvelle.
Part of a larger manuscript, this late-fifteenth-century volvelle provided a means of making astrological calculations. CC0 1.0 image courtesy National Library of Wales and Wikimedia Commons.
The Early Days of Movable Books
Medicine, astronomy, calculation, and even occult science and theology: the early use of what’s more generally called “movable books” hardly sounds like what we associate today with children’s literature. Indeed, even as their technologies developed—using different flaps, for example, to explore the inner workings of the human body, or paper unfolding to reveal a tunnel for the reader to look through—movable books wouldn’t become a medium for children until the mid-eighteenth century, with British printer and publisher Robert Sayer’s Harlequinade series. Named after its main character, this series of books made use of flaps to reveal different parts of a scene, making children’s experience with the text more interactive. These turn-up books, or flap books, were so popular that other printers tried to get in on the game, producing their own tales in a movable book format.
Robert Sayer’s Harlequinade series spawned many imitations—like this one by Benjamin Sands, published in 1814 by Samuel Wood. CC BY-SA 4.0 image courtesy Nicolet1327 and Wikimedia Commons.
Among the early publishers known for their movable books was the eighteenth-century Englishman John Newberry; in the nineteenth century, there were English publisher Thomas Dean and Son, as well as German illustrator Lothar Meggendorfer. Meggendorfer took the form to a new level, making use of pull tabs to activate multiple parts of a given page. His innovations, and his more than two hundred movable books, are considered so significant that two of the Movable Book Society’s semiannual awards are named for him. (In 2018, Zahhak: Legend of the Serpent King received one of them: the Meggendorfer Prize for Best Paper Engineering!)
The Wartime Pause of Pop-ups and the Rise of Self-Erecting Books
Even though modernized printing and production techniques allowed movable books to be produced more cheaply and to reach wider audiences, World War I interfered with their promulgation. At the time, the most prolific and skillful movable book publishers were in Germany; both there and in most other countries involved in the conflict, all available materials were devoted to war efforts—and to top it off, other nations didn’t have the systems or the skilled artisans necessary to produce their own movable books of the same quality. By the 1930s, though, the industry was back in full swing, thanks for one thing to London’s S. Louis Giraud’s modestly priced Bookano series. And by that time, another innovation to the movable book world had been introduced. Whereas previously published volumes were dependent upon a system of strings a reader needed to pull in order to make the figures pop up, the new technique of using the turning page itself as a sort of spring mechanism led to the books that are now more familiar to us: “self-erecting books.” It was only in 1932 that New York-based Blue Ribbon Publishing copyrighted the term “pop-up.”
As pop-up books continued to grow in popularity during the twentieth century, they fell victim once again to the realities of global politics. Even though Czech artist Vojtěch Kubašta’s pop-up books were incredibly popular in the 1950s and 1960s, fans in the United States would be hard-pressed to find them, thanks to Cold War import restrictions. During that time, US publisher Waldo Hunt devoted himself to satisfying Americans’ pop-up cravings. One of the companies he founded, Intervisual Books, continues to produce moveable books—and in 2000, “credited with ushering in the Second Golden Age of Pop-ups,” Hunt himself was awarded the Movable Book Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Vojtěch Kubašta’s pop-up book Cinderella. Bulgarian edition, 1971.
Movable Books: A Team Effort
Take just a quick look at The Seven Trials of Rostam, and you’ll be in no doubt that putting a movable book together is no easy feat, even with the availability of contemporary production methods. In fact, the rare class of professionals known as paper engineers are essential for working out the mechanics behind authors’ and artists’ visions; Atlas Obscura estimates that you could look all over the world and might only be able to find between 75 and 100 paper engineers. (In fact, Simon Arizpe, Rostam’s paper engineer, was recognized by the Movable Book Society with its 2018 Meggendorfer Prize.) And in addition to the artists who create a pop-up book’s illustrations and the engineers who make them move, there are, of course, the trained professionals who actually put the books together; this is no job for a machine!
Resources and Further Reading on Pop-up Books
Want to learn more about the history of movable and pop-up books? Check out these helpful resources!
Candy Bedworth, “The Surprising History of Pop-Up Books,” Daily Art Magazine, 19 December 2022. A brief history of movable books, filled with photographs of different types that make up the medium.
Kristine Chapman, “Volvelles: Early Paper Calculators,” Museum Wales, 19 July 2019. An overview of volvelles in particular—and a worksheet that will help you create your own paper calculator!
Kelsey Kennedy, “The History of Movable Paper in One Massive, 9,000-Book Collection,” Atlas Obscura, 15 June 2017. An interview with Ellen G. K. Rubin, aka the Populady, about her extensive collection of movable books, as well as a brief history of these books and of the people who help create them.
Ann K. D. Myers, “Volvelles: the rotating diagrams with some assembly required,” Stanford Libraries, 18 December 2019. A brief introduction to volvelles, as well as an examination of one of the volumes in Stanford’s collection that makes use of them.
The Movable Book Society. The society describes itself as “a nonprofit organization [that] provides a forum for artists, book sellers, book producers, collectors, curators, and others to share enthusiasm and exchange information about pop-up and movable books. There are nearly 450 members worldwide.”
Ellen G. K. Rubin, The Popuplady. Rubin’s extensive website covers everything from a history of movable books to how to care for them.
“A Brief History of Early Movable Books,” University of North Texas Libraries. A thorough resource on movable books and an examination of some of their significant creators and publishers.
Happen to be in Chicago? Drop by the Newberry Library to check out their collection of pop-up books. Between March 21 and July 15, they even have an entire exhibit devoted to them!