The Reigning Prince of Pop-Up Books

His name is Robert Sabuda.

From a profile in the Wall Street Journal...

"A lot of what I do is kind of close to a magic trick," he says. "You're trying to hide how something is being done."

Mr. Sabuda grew up in rural Michigan and comes from three generations of carpenters. His father worked as a bricklayer and woodworker, and his mother was a secretary. At his high-school art teacher's urging, he went to Pratt Institute in New York City to study art and design. In his sophomore year, a teacher told the class to build a paper pop-up. Most students turned in simple shapes like pop-up triangles. Mr. Sabuda fashioned a boy in a propeller plane flying through some clouds.

The following year, he got an internship with a children's-book editor at Dial Press. A few years later, in 1994, he published his first pop-up book, "The Christmas Alphabet." Since then, he's led innovations in the field, pushing the boundaries of scale, adding little books within books with smaller pop-ups, and creating all-white pop-ups—a rarity in the color-saturated world of children's books.

Mr. Sabuda occasionally gets odd requests from people in other industries who want him to build things, ranging from Broadway stage sets to a pop-up architectural model for a skyscraper in Dubai to a foldable inhaler for people with asthma. He turns most of these requests down, citing time constraints or unrealistic expectations. Apart from a line of pop-up cards that he designs for the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Sabuda largely sticks to books.