Harold M. Goralnick (Bowdoin Class of 1971) began acquiring pop-ups and other “movable” books in 1999.  In 2008 he donated his collection to the College to make it publicly accessible and to complement the Library’s broader holdings in the book arts.  The collection numbers over 1,900 volumes, dating mainly from the 1940s to the present.  Most of the books have been published in the United States or Great Britain, but some, particularly fairy tales, also appear in German, French, Czech, and Italian, among other languages.  The Library continues to acquire pop-up books to add to the collection.

Mr. Goralnick collected some pop-up books because of the paper engineer who created them: David A. Carter, Dick Dudley, Bruce Foster, David Hawcock, Vojtěch Kubašta, Tor Lokvig, Lothar Meggendorfer, Kees Moerbeek, Keith Moseley, Chuck Murphy, Ernest Nister, David Pelham, Ib Penick, Matthew Reinhart, Robert Sabuda, Rodger Smith, John Strejan, Ron van der Meer, Julian Wehr.  Others were acquired because of their subject matter: fairy tales; the alphabet and counting; animals; space travel; monsters and haunted houses; Star Wars; religion; architecture; erotica; insects; dinosaurs; earth science.

This online exhibition has been adapted from the public display at Hawthorne-Longfellow Library during spring semester 2011. It features works that demonstrate the wide diversity of pop-up books—for children and for adults. In addition to items from the Goralnick Collection are other books from Special Collections, mostly artists’ books, that also celebrate paper engineering at its finest.