AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The Hanson Rare Book and Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Collections at the University of Florida contain hundreds of pop-up and movable books. These books span the breadth of paper engineering—from the earliest Lull volvelle to the intense Reinhart Disney pop-ups of today. Their contents contain the history of paper engineering: how they evolved through various publishing houses, adopted technologies from other industries, and propagated around the globe to become one of the most engaging and increasingly popular book forms of today, and yet many are actively falling apart.

Upon review of several of these engineering marvels, I found that the damage is not due to typical readership wear, but rather due to people’s innate curiosity in how these mechanisms are made and function. Given the task to repair and maintain them for long-term use, I realized that a methodology that catered to the curious maker—giving those who are interested greater access to the engineering structures within these books—could preserve these items for longer. I also wanted to make these engineering structures more accessible for those who could not come to our reading room and spend time with the books in our collections (digital scans simply do not evoke the movement of these items). In this presentation, I will move the audience through the methodological changes we made and all the conservation decisions one must make when repairing these types of books, creating models for researchers, and utilizing animation software as a form of engagement and preservation.

Partnering with a digital specialist, we choose one mechanism/page in a book to animate. This page also undergoes scanning for the purpose of creating facsimiles and models that are eventually housed with the item and available for research. These models and facsimiles can be more roughly handled by those trying to understand the structure while still having access to the original they can see and carefully handle. The pdf model of the structure is also linked to the scanned book in our digital library, making it available for anyone to print out and re-create at home or in a classroom. The conservation issues that arise when animating movables and pop-ups with Adobe as well as 3D photogrammetry software will be discussed.

Considering the dearth of published papers discussing the repair of movables and pop-ups in professional journals, the history of the technologies that brought these books about is integral to understanding how to conserve these items back to working order and therefore will be discussed briefly even though imaging will be the main focus of this presentation.