For These Engineers, It’s Only a Pop-Up Paper World

In the Peter Pan world of designing children’s books lives a small brotherhood of artists who never grew up. Not in their hearts, anyway.

While the rest of us are at work, they’re devising ways to make pictures change, vignettes move and pages of a pop-up book delight like a party gag or a jack-in-the-box.

And they get paid for it.

Outside of never-never land, they’re called paper engineers, and in the real world they’ll probably never be out of a job. There are few more than a dozen in this male-dominated field, and seven or eight of them work in Southern California.

‘Think Like a Child’

“You have to think like a child, that’s your marketplace, to think like a child would think,” said free-lance paper engineer John Strejan, 54, known by his peers as “the Blade,” “Silverblade” or “the Maestro” for his masterful skill with an X-Acto knife, the tool of the paper engineer’s trade.

Like an architect, a paper engineer is both artist and skilled designer. But unlike an architect, he can’t go to college to learn his trade.

“There are no courses, per se, that teach paper engineering,” said Arnold Shapiro, president of Compass Productions in Long Beach, producers of children’s novelty books.

Most of them learn through a kind of apprenticeship, and a few who have a natural aptitude for it are self-taught.

David Rosendale is in the latter category. A native of England, he was a fine artist, a student of painting and print at the Wimbledon School of Art, who especially liked working with paper.

“Someone bought me the Hallmark pop-up book called ‘Counting Bears’ for my 21st birthday because they thought it would appeal to me,” Rosendale, 33, said. “From there I began teaching myself.” As he learned the art, his designs, mostly ships, became more complicated.

After seeing the late English paper engineer Vic Duppawhyte talk about the art on a British television program, he tracked him down.

“He taught me the finer aspects of it, and I worked with him from 1976 until 1983.”

That year, through his ties with Duppawhyte, Rosendale was offered a job as a paper engineer at Intervisual Communications Inc. in Los Angeles, the world’s largest producer of children’s novelty books.

Need Drafting Skills

David Carter, an art director and paper engineer at Intervisual, said of the craft: “You have to have what I call ‘board skills’--in other words, drafting skills. Being able to do accurate work at a drawing table. It’s just the opposite of doing freehand work. I fall back on the drafting courses I had in the eighth grade.

“Someone like (paper engineer) Tor (Lokvig) can sit down and do drafting and actually design buildings. He does that every once in a while,” Carter said.

Lokvig, 45, who moved here from Denmark in 1959 and attended art school in Los Angeles, beganas a draftsman for two mechanical engineers. He admits his strengths are more on the mechanical 1936286821movement of paper joints.

A free-lance paper engineer, Lokvig is well-known for his work in the Kate Greenway award-winning pop-up book “Haunted House,” the largest selling pop-up book to date (nearly 1 million copies), and for the much-publicized Transamerica pop-up ad that appeared in Time magazine in September, 1986.

“It’s a fairly well-paid profession,” Lokvig said. The artists make anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 a year, depending on their experience and, for the free-lancers, their ability to get the big jobs.

‘Father’ of the Craft

Most of the paper engineers who learned their skills along the way did so from Ib Penick, former vice president and creative director at Intervisual and considered by them to be “the father of paper engineering in this country.”

What Penick taught them was how to put magic in the pages of a book.

“It’s the participation that a child has in working these things that’s fun,” said Dick Dudley, paper engineer and vice president of Compass Productions.

“You want to be able to pull tabs and see a clown juggling balls. It’s the novelty of the surprise--when you do something and something changes right there on the page,” he said.

Of course, the easiest way to make that happen in a pop-up book is to just turn the page, but that trick can come off like a tired old joke if a paper engineer doesn’t find new ways to keep it unpredictable.

Lights, Sounds, Smells

Surprises in today’s books, which line the shelves of stores this holiday season, can amaze the child in everyone. In “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” judged by Parents magazine to be one of the 10 best baby books in England, a star actually twinkles with light when a tab, designed to connect with an electronic chip, is pulled.

The pull of a tab or the touch of a hand can also produce the sound of a cricket, or the scent of a child’s favorite food.

But the surprises paper engineers value most highly and strive the hardest for are derived from skillful cutting and engineering techniques. When combined with a good concept, wonderful art and a well-written story, they offer the child or adult a piece of paper artwork that can provide pleasure for years.

Pop-up books vary widely in design, complexity and price. Sold by all the well-known publishers, they’re printed in as many as 17 languages and most have price tags anywhere from $4.95 to $18.95.

Monthlong Process

“The paper engineering phase of a book usually takes about a month,” Carter said, with an entire book taking an average of 15 months from “blank sheet of paper to the bookstores.”

The artists begin with the concept, or editorial idea, which may come from a publisher or the in-house editorial department.

“Then we do a rough cut of the concept,” Carter said. “The creative director chooses a designer/paper engineer to oversee the project, and an illustrator, which may be someone the publisher has in mind.

“The illustrator does pencil drawings, which the paper engineer works from and refines, making suggestions and improvements so that the drawings and engineering work together.”

Final Steps to Publication

When the mechanics and the art are finished, the final cut is separated, or laser scanned, into a halftone, with the colors separated. One hundred sheets are printed for proofing so the paper engineer can cut the printed designs into book form for the final refinement.

Next, the final dies are made. Then the book is printed on one large sheet of paper, stamped, which may be done locally, and sent to factories in Mexico, Colombia or Singapore, where labor is cheap, to be hand assembled. From there the book is sent to the publishers.

Some of the best books in recent years have captured the attention of adults, who have rediscovered pop-ups because of their resurgence in commercial advertising.

“The Human Body,” an award-winning book with paper engineering by Duppawhyte and Rosendale, is written on a junior college level. An exploration of the body, it allows the reader to make a heart beat, lungs breathe, muscles contract and bones in the ear vibrate from sound.

Three-Dimensional Images

The controversial “The Facts of Life,” paper engineered by Strejan, James Diaz, Rosendale and English book designer David Pelham, traces conception from three-dimensional sperm to birth in dramatic and colorful pop-ups of human embryos and male and female reproductive systems against black backgrounds.

“Sailing Ships” and “Flight: Great Planes of the Century,” which feature the work of Rosendale, Strejan and Rodger Smith, offer three-dimensional models of world-famous ships and aircraft, along with histories of both.

Pelham’s dramatic and beautiful “Starbirth,” “The Solar System,” “Galaxies” and “The End of the Universe” are truly paper wonders. They were created with extra fold-out space for a thoughtful text by science writer Heather Cooper.

Also scheduled to be in bookstores before the end of the year is “How Many Bugs in a Box?” It is the first book designed, illustrated and written by Carter to teach preschoolers color, number and shapes. The cleanly designed pop-up in primary colors asks “How many bugs in the red box?” When a child pulls the tab, “1 tough bug” pumping iron is revealed.

“The Great Movies Live,” with mechanics by English paper engineer Ron van der Meer, features pop-ups of famous scenes from classic movies such as “King Kong,” “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Casablanca.” When the reader opens to “Casablanca,” the movie theme, “As Time Goes By,” plays from the page.

Renaissance in 1960s

If Ib Penick can be called the father of paper engineering, then Los Angeles publisher Waldo Hunt, president of Intervisual, is the “knight in shining armor” who brought about the renaissance in mechanical books in the early ‘60s, after World War I brought a halt to their production.

Hunt, then a private collector of antique books, stirred new interest in the pop-ups, or movable books, which can be traced to scientific texts published in the 1540s.

Children’s pop-up books were developed in mid-19th-Century England and improved upon artistically and mechanically in the late 1800s by two German artists, Ernest Nister and Lothar Meggendorfer, whose work has been reproduced by Hunt in one of his favorite books, “The Genius of Lothar Meggendorfer.”

Today, Hunt’s company, which produces about 70% of the novelty children’s books on the market, employs, either full time or on a free-lance basis, most of the paper engineers working in the United States.

And to make sure that there will always be another paper engineer looking for a job, Hunt conducts interviews at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, testing students in the areas of design, art and aptitude for dimensional graphics. He accepts the brightest ones on a free-lance basis to apprentice with his artists.

Guidance a Necessity

“Even if you’re born with the aptitude, unless you have the opportunity to do the work under guidance, you can’t become proficient at it,” Hunt said.

Perhaps the finest examples of pop-up books are two books scheduled for publication in the fall of ’88.

Though the books are a team effort by paper engineers Diaz, Rosendale and Strejan, they mostly are a showcase for Strejan’s genius with the knife.

Titled “Dinosaurs” and “Animals Showing Off,” they are part of a series of books offered each year by National Geographic to its subscribers.

Not only do they feature state-of-the-art paper engineering, but the best in art, design and writing.

“They’re a really good teaching tool for kids who want to learn about nature,” Strejan said.

Strejan, former art director for Bullock’s Department Stores and Teen magazine, has “been an artist since the day I was born, almost. Thinking I was going to be one of 10 people in a field never crossed my mind.”

Refined Mechanics of Books

He has refined the mechanics in the National Geographic books since he started doing them three years ago.

“If you took apart one of the first books in the series, it’s much more complicated in assembly points than the ‘Dinosaurs’ book, even though the ‘Dinosaurs’ book looks more complicated,” said Diaz, who recently left Intervisual as executive art director to start his own company back East.

“We keep the costs down by refining the mechanics. That’s the main job of a paper engineer,” he said.

Strejan, a versatile artist who can also design and illustrate, does that job best.

“He’s very visual,” Diaz said. “John can take a knife to paper and actually draw with it without ever setting pen to paper. You can see the shapes coming to life.”

A native of Detroit, Strejan is also appreciated for his sense of humor and often engages in some good-natured ribbing with his peers.

Others Tear Up His Work

Fellow paper engineers in Europe, who consider him “the Maestro,” “tear apart his work each time he does a book, just so they can see how he did it,” Diaz said.

Duppawhyte, who Strejan considered a master, was one of them.

“Once when Vic was still around, John talked about putting ‘Eat your heart out, Vic Duppawhyte’ inside one of the mechanical points in a book because he knew Vic would see it,” Diaz said.

“We all have a lot of respect for everyone else’s talents.”

Besides refining the mechanics, another challenge to paper engineers is designing movements that can take a great deal of abuse. Hence the improvements like Lokvig’s plastic rivet.

To someone outside the business of novelty books, it might seems as though it has all been done, that there are no new tricks to pull out of the paper hat.

“We’re only limited by our imagination and creativity,” Hunt said, adding that one concept his artists are working on is something he calls “walking puppet books, where there are two glove fingers attached to the book and the child can actually make the character walk around. This is something that hasn’t been done.”

The satisfaction that comes from seeing their ideas through from start to finish appeals to the artists, but Rosendale said: “There is also the desire to work at something that will live on after you’re gone, something you can leave behind.”

The artists claim their work is never boring, but once in a while a publisher “wants something on the dull side.”

When that starts to get to him, Diaz said, “ ‘The Blade’ kicks my butt and we go at it again.

“He fires everybody up. He takes us in the conference room and tells us to check our egos at the door. Then we take the project, turn it upside down, maybe redo it, and come up with a more interesting idea than we thought possible.”

Arnold Shapiro isn’t too concerned that the occasional dull request from a publisher will stifle any creativity.

“Paper engineers are a unique breed who can make paper dance. They are wizards, and I’m in awe of their talent.”