Pop Culture : Picture books that speak volumes

Joanne Page opens a book dating to the 1890s and invites her visitor to pull a tab at the paper’s edge. A gentle tug and a dog backs into his house just as a donkey prepares to kick--the scene driven by a cunning system of hidden paper levers and rivets.

Pop-up children’s books, with their three-dimensional illustrations, were popular in the 1890s and, improbably enough, are a hit again with today’s virtual-pet, high-tech youth. (Many are published by Intervisual Books Inc. in Santa Monica.) But there’s long been a collectors’ market for the books, which is where Page comes in.

A former Los Angeles County Museum of Art paper conservator, Page is one of only a handful of conservators in the world who specialize in the restoration of pop-up books. Working for collectors from as far away as Maine, Page spends her days performing reconstructive surgery on paper animals that have lost hooves and pull tabs that have surrendered their function to 100 years of what she calls “joyous destruction.”

So what draws today’s average hard-wired youth to these fragile books? “Each page,” Page says, “is a surprise.” Imagine.