"The first Daily Express Children’s Annual came out in 1929 with seven of these special 3D effects, including a pop-up Rupert Bear- his first appearance between hard covers. Theodore Brown, whose background was in cinema-photography and stereoscopy, provided the inspiration and, I believe, designs for the earlier models,Giraud acting as a gifted manufacturing and marketing entrepreneu
Five Express annuals appeared, of increasingly sophisticated design, and were evidently sufficiently successful for Giraud to hive off the concept and launch his own ‘Bookano’ annuals under the independent Strand Publications imprint, starting in 1934. The series continued for another seventeen years and, despite the blitz and severe paper rationing of the Second World War, there was not a single Christmas between then and 1951 that did not see the publication of a new Bookano Series-‘complete with pictures that spring up in model form’.
Bookano/Strand produced many other pop-up items such as The Story of Jesus (1937), Hans Anderson’s Fairy Stories (1939) and even a make-it-yourself pop-up booklet called The Bookano Adventure and Building Book (circa 1936), which is now quite rare.
Although Girard patented the ‘living model’ concept worldwide, his limited resources evidently prevented him stopping Harold Lentz from flagrantly breaching the copyright with a series published in New York during the 1930s under the Blue Ribbon imprint. Lentz was a gifted graphic artist of the German school (whereas Giraud was never more than competent, either as a writer or illustrator) and produced his books for a richer market. The Blue Ribbon titles, such as Pinocchio (1932) and Jack the Giant Killer (1933) have better graphics and a higher standard of production than any of the Bookano equivalents, yet all Lentz’s innovations were derived from England, despite the fact that he was the first to coin the name ‘pop-up’
Far more original were the animated books of Julian Wehr, another American immigrant from Europe, who, during the 1940s and early 50s,produced a series of charming and ingenious moving books for (amongst others) the Garden City Publishing Co. and/or the Duenewald Printing Corp, both of New York. These exploited improved Webb Offset colour printing technology and plastic ring binding, both of which lowered cost without cheapening the product.
Wehr’s graphic style was derived from Disney’s but the way he produced telling movements in his pictures with the simplest of mechanical means had elegance almost worthy of Meggendorfer. He was prolific, producing over thirty movables in less than a decade, the patented designs being marketed through his firm,Wehr Animations. Most of the usual nursery rhyme and pantomime subjects were treated, such as Animated Story Rhymes and Puss in Boots (both1944).
Giraud’s death in 1951 left something of a vacuum in the British pop-up book scene. He had a virtual monopoly here during and immediately after the war, presumably because most other children’s book publishers felt daunted by the amount of specialised hand-finishing that would be required in order to compete with him. The printing industry was emerging from a period of unprecedented hardship during which there had been restrictions on all aspects of production. As a result, most books at this time - especially children’s books- seemed drab."
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