A World Where Everyone’s a Pop Star

In Waldo Hunt’s world, anyone’s apt to pop up--Mickey Mouse, Buck Rogers, Elvis. . . .

Hunt is proprietor of what he believes to be the world’s only museum of pop-up books, a fantasy land where fanged purple monsters jump out of pages, things go squeak and beep and, at the pull of a tab, fairy-tale icons spring to life.

Like a kid in a toy store, Hunt, 75, shows visitors his treasures, pausing in front of a glass case housing the best of the English pop-up artists. Here we find Charles and Di on their wedding day, gazing happily into one another’s eyes.

“Pull that tab and you get them kissing,” Hunt says. “That one’s going to be worth a lot of money.”

About 4,000 movable books--books with fold-outs, books with pages that open like Venetian blinds, peekaboo books--are in Hunt’s collection, tucked away on the second floor of a Santa Monica office building.

The museum, open by appointment, is just 18 months old, but Hunt’s fascination with pop-ups dates from 1960, when Czech designers began making quality pop-ups, reviving an art form that had languished since being perfected by the Germans between the late 1800s and World War I.

“You’d find the books in a bin somewhere for a dollar. They didn’t have any respect because they were not hardcover quality books, but the mechanics were marvelous, exciting,” Hunt recalls. As an advertising man in Los Angeles, he immediately saw commercial potential.

Soon, Hunt took his idea and his infant company, Graphics International, to New York, but “couldn’t convince any publisher to buy a pop-up book.” Too expensive to produce, they told him, too little profit margin.

Undeterred, Hunt took his conviction and his prototype for a pop-up chuck wagon to Del Monte foods, which inserted it as an ad in Progressive Grocer magazine. Chrysler followed suit, featuring a pop-up Dodge truck in Sports Illustrated.

Hunt’s big break came from the late Bennett Cerf, then chairman of Random House. In 1965, Hunt sold the “Bennett Cerf Pop-Up Riddle Book” to General Foods as a premium--there were 200,000 takers for a dollar and two Maxwell House coffee labels each. Random House published the premium books and 50,000 additional copies, its first pop-up book.

By 1974, Hallmark had bought Graphics International and Hunt was back in L.A., “starting from scratch.” But with his new company, Intervisual Communications (now Intervisual Books), he was positioned to become king of the pop-ups. The company, of which he’s chairman and majority stockholder, has produced 1,000 movable books and commands the largest slice of the worldwide market.

Intervisual is a packager/producer, selling pop-ups to publishers. Major clients include Disney, for which Intervisual has done 150 books. Also popping out of the pages of books conceived at Intervisual have been Babar and Barbie, Peter Rabbit and Paddington Bear, Madeline and the Flintstones. That adds up to 150 million books.

Along the way, Hunt began collecting. In a burst of enthusiasm, he gave 500 antique pop-ups to UCLA “before I got the idea of my own museum.” He also gave an original of “International Circus” (1887) by Lothar Meggendorfer, a puppeteer who was Germany’s pop-up genius, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for reproduction. Years later, he paid $10,000 to replace this 5-foot pop-up panorama. With its six-ring circus and 450 spectators, it is his most valuable book.

Other museum serendipities include a 15th century Italian astrology book with revolving disks showing the movement of the stars (on loan from UCLA) and a copy of “Haunted House,” by Jan Pienkowski, produced by Intervisual for E.P. Dutton. The most successful all-time pop-up, with sales topping a million, it delights with creepy creatures that jump out of stairwells, sinks and closets.

The collection includes about 1,000 antiques, as well as reproductions and contemporary works by artists such as Andy Warhol. Also here is “How Many Bugs in a Box,” a classic by paper engineer David Carter, who apprenticed at Intervisual. Hunt takes pride in noting that he coined the term “paper engineer.”

“This is Maisy. She’s a mouse and this is her house,” Hunt is saying. He’s not embarrassed to play with something like a mouse house--”A lot of these books are more for adults than for children.” He fiddles with another. “Look at the wheels go around. Isn’t it exciting? Absolutely wonderful. The windshield wipers go swish, swish, swish.”

In a world of videos and CD-ROMs, the concept may seem downright quaint, but Hunt says nothing compares with “making something happen yourself.” And if, at the yank of a tab, “you see the princess and the palace and the coach, it becomes more real.” He calls it the “Wow!” factor.

Hunt hopes to get backing soon for a proper children’s book museum in West L.A. “Pop-Up Books! 500 Years of Wonder and Wizardry,” a display of 300 books from his collection, will be a feature of the California International Antiquarian Book Fair from Feb. 16-18 at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton and Towers Hotel.

Parents’ Power

Sylvia Ann Hewlett has a name for the ennui afflicting America’s parents: “parental time famine.” It’s what happens when too many demands clash with too little societal support.

Hewlett, mother of three and president of the nonprofit National Parenting Assn., believes America’s families will continue to be shortchanged until they pressure those in power to make family-friendly policies.

To this end, the New York-based association is launching “Parents to the Polls: A National Campaign to Mobilize the Parent Vote” in six pilot states--perhaps including California--by the 1996 election.

In Los Angeles, exploring support and looking for leaders, Hewlett recently lunched with 25 movers and doers--among them social workers, a filmmaker, educators--at the Pacific Palisades home of Francine Diamond, activist and mother of two.

In an interview, she advocated a national agenda that “puts fire in the belly of parents. Kids will stay at the end of the queue if they don’t have a mobilized constituency speaking out on their behalf.”

That was the core message she brought to the lunch group, together with some eye-opening statistics: In 1994, only 39% of parents voted (down from 65% in the ‘50s). Not coincidentally, in 1994, 6 million American families included two adults holding down four jobs.

At focus groups in Minnesota, Ohio, Arizona, Oregon and New York, Hewlett has been asking parents “what gets them mad, what gets them desperate.” Among the replies: school schedules that are a working couple’s nightmare and the tax penalty for marriage.

One of six daughters in a poor Welsh mining family, Hewlett had little materially, but she did have the priceless gift of a strong family life. Educated at Cambridge, Harvard and London universities, in the ‘70s she became an assistant professor of economics at New York’s Barnard, a women’s college that had no maternity leave policy. After having stillborn twins and, later, a premature baby, she took a leave of absence, which, she’s convinced, led to her being fired.

Hewlett thought, “Surely there were millions of American women hanging on by their fingernails.”

She founded the National Parenting Assn. a year after publication of her 1992 book, “When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children” (HarperCollins). Its target group is the “vital center,” or broadly defined middle class, which Hewlett believes has been neglected while the pro-family agenda was co-opted by the left and the Christian right. Parents to the Polls wants America’s 58 million parents to take a page out of the book of the elderly, 70% of whom vote.

In June, representatives from pilot states will meet in New York to finalize an agenda for a campaign launch, with media blitz, in September.