Renaissance Pop-Up Books
@ Newberry Library
60 W Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610
Opening Thursday, September 6th, from 6PM - 7:30PM
Pop-up books aren’t a modern invention: since the dawn of print, interactive features like flaps, fold-outs, and dials called “volvelles” have been enticing readers to pause between page turns for a more immersive sensory experience.
In this free meet-the-author talk, the Newberry’s Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts Suzanne Karr Schmidt will discuss how Renaissance pop-up books—part text, part image, and part sculpture—engaged readers of the past.
Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance tells the story of a hands-on genre of prints: how innovative paper engineering redefined the relationship of early modern viewers to art, humanism, and science.
Interactive and sculptural prints pervaded the European reading market of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Single sheets and book illustrations featured movable flaps and dials, and functioned as kits to build three-dimensional scientific instruments. These hybrid constructions—part text, part image, and part sculpture—engaged readers; so did the polemical, satirical, and, occasionally, erotic content. By manipulating dials and flaps, or building and using the instruments, viewers learned to think through images as well as words, interacting visually with desires, social critique, and knowledge itself.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt is the Newberry Library’s George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts. British Airways once heralded her book as “unusual and distinctive.” Her other publications include Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life.
This event is free, but registration in advance is required. Please reserve your spot on Eventbrite.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/renaissance-pop-up-books-tickets-43415100735
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Tags: Chicago, Near North Side, Newberry Library, Renaissance Pop-Up Books
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