Naomi Brookner/The Gazette
Pop-up book making expert Carol Barton, left, works in her Bethesda studio with her assistant Eleni Smitham, 11.
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A friend showed Carol Barton a 1920s Italian pop-up book version of "Sleeping Beauty." The garage sale treasure struck a chord with the Glen Echo resident, who owned no such books in her own childhood.
When folded back until its covers touched, a three-dimensional scene emerged from the book, and its cut, layered pages made theatrical scenes. In search of more books with moving parts, she visited the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the National Institutes of Health Library. And, now, after 25 years of practicing in the field of "paper engineering," Barton is both an aficionado and an expert.
Barton's most recent book, is the second in a three-volume series, is "The Pocket Paper Engineer, How to Make Pop-Ups Step-by-Step."
The book's color-coded directions and designs are easy to follow. A list of items necessary to complete the projects, along with a resource guide on where these tools can be purchased, is included. Pockets are provided to store completed projects.
According to Barton,"[Pop-ups] are small, hand-held magic acts, appearing and disappearing across the page with the verve of actors making stage entrances and exits, telling dimensional stories."
As the child of a diesel engine mechanic, Barton spent many hours taking things apart and putting them back together.
"I do have some mechanical skills from childhood," she says. "I think [paper engineering] sort of awakened some of that."
The first volume of "The Pocket Paper Engineer" explains basic techniques. This one gets into the methods of making platforms, props, spirals and straddles. The third, Barton says, will address the v-fold, a dramatic way of making figures stand straight up off the page.
Not all Barton's books are instructional manuals intended for a mass audience. Many, she says, are sculptural pieces for individuals to savor. She sells them to collectors and displays them in museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum and London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
"It's just a fascinating art form," she says, adding that the difficulty of figuring out how to make something fragile into a sturdy machine is what has kept her interest.
Coming up with artistic ideas that mesh with the necessary mechanics is both the fun and challenge of it.
"I never run out of ideas," she says.
Making pop-ups teaches students about geometry, such engineering concepts as tension and load-bearing weight, and can even help some learn to write creatively. For visual learners, sometimes ideas for stories are born out of building paper art, she points out.
"The activity encourages kids to use their imaginations, experiment, observe the world around them and envision a future they can help to create," she says.
On the faculty of The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Barton lectures and presents workshops at arts centers and schools around the country.
She self-published this book because the publishers who expressed interest wanted her to keep the material simple so it could be marketed to young children. Her target audience, however, is age 9 and older.
She attributes the fascination with pop-up books to the nature of the interaction, that people hold and manipulate it just for their own eyes.
"It's sort of gratifying that that's still very magical," she says.
"The Pocket Paper Engineer, How to Make Pop-Ups Step-by Step, Volume 2" is available for purchase at www.popular
kinetics.com as well as at online and local booksellers.
