A literary-world career that simply jumped off the page

Robert Sabuda spends most of his day coloring, cutting and pasting. He’s darn good at it too.

But Sabuda is no kindergartner. He’s a 40-year-old children’s book author whose newest, “Winter’s Tale: An Original Pop-Up Story,” was ordered with a first printing of 250,000 copies. It’s also the basis for many of the holiday decorations at Borders and Waldenbooks stores this season.

Pop-up art is a kid-friendly name for paper engineering. Sabuda says he doesn’t work on a computer as many other children’s book authors and illustrators do; instead, he works with tiny pieces of paper, trying to make them fit together so they open, pop up and close back down each time a child flips a page. “There’s a lot of trial and error,” he says with a laugh.

“There should be one second of magic as you open a page of a book,” Sabuda adds, giving a tour of his “studio” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The tour doesn’t take long: The studio consists of a conference room with walls lined by Sabuda’s books, those of his partner Matthew Reinhart (including his latest, “Cinderella”) and books by artists they admire, including Maurice Sendak and Sandra Boynton. The other room has five stations: one each for Sabuda and Reinhart, and three others for the more technical types who then figure out how to take Sabuda and Reinhart’s paper pieces and fit them on a computer screen.

On this day, the office is abuzz as the pieces of a new book with the legendary Sendak just fell into place. Reinhart also is eager to show off the tiger character he’s created for a pop-up adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.”

Sabuda and Reinhart also are working on a pop-up version of a great white shark for the second part of a trilogy of nonfiction books they’re doing about the beasts of land and air. Scholastic is giving the duo their own imprint, which in the kiddie-book world is the equivalent of being knighted. It will be called Sabuda and Reinhart Present. One of the first projects will be a book on castles.

Sabuda and Reinhart moved so quickly to the top of their class, they explain, because there are very few people who do what they do.

Sabuda, the youngest board member at the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, fell into his line of work, although growing up in Michigan he was always enchanted by books. His favorites included Sesame Street books, “Frog and Toad” and “The Adventures of Super Pickle,” his first pop-up.

While an art student at Pratt Institute in New York, he interned at Dial Books for Young Readers, and it was Sabuda’s job to open the packages of original art. He was hooked. In his senior year, he decided to focus on children’s books.

Dial remembered the talented Sabuda, and the rest, he says, “is a Cinderella story.”

By 1992, Sabuda was writing his own books, using flat art -- mostly collages and mosaics.

Sabuda acknowledges that he might have an unusual method in an increasingly digital world.

“Parents are busy. They want time with their kids to be well spent.... There’s greater attention to children’s books now as a backlash to the technology in kids’ lives. Parents feel the need to give an alternative to all the media saturation.”