The pop-up wonders of Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart

My girlfriend recently had a birthday, and I gave her a little pile of pop-up books as gifts. No, my girlfriend isn't six. (Honestly, officer.) But she is a fan of really well-made pop-ups, and nobody makes 'em better than New York artists Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart.

If you haven't had occasion to check out pop-up books lately, you've missed out on an amazing renaissance in the form, largely thanks to the work of Sabuda and Reinhart. They do things with paper that don't even seem possible. In Sabuda's Wizard of Oz, a Kansas twister comes spinning out at your face and an entire Emerald City rises off the page, green and glittery and so solid you feel like you could walk around in it. In his version of Alice in Wonderland, the courtroom scene culminates in dozens of playing card people flying off the page and around the giant Alice's head like a swarm of angry hornets - and they actually fly off the page, hovering there before you. It's like nothing you've ever seen.

In this clip the pair walk you through some of their relatively crude early work, building up to the full-color extravaganzas they create today.



If you know a kid who isn't interested in reading, buy them one of these books and they'll spend days on the floor of their bedroom, turning those pages and trying to figure out the magic between those covers. And take my word for it, these books make fairly inexpensive but spectacular gifts for your girlfriend, wife, mistress or common-law bride. Who needs fancy chocolates and diamond rings when they can open a book and have their own Narnia, their own Wonderland, their own Oz?


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