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Popville: popup book cleverly and delightfully illustrates the growth of a town

Cory Doctorow at 9:20 am Tue, Aug 3, 2010

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Popville is a sweet, slender little pop-up book that illustrates the growth of a town from a single farmhouse to a thriving city in a series of stylized scenes that build, one upon the next, through a window cut out of the center of the page, so that each development literally overlays the ones beneath. My toddler has fallen in love with the book and its additive scenes, and the grownups I've shown it to finds it equally fascinating. The cutaway in the book's center is a genuinely clever bit of business that creates a sense of time's passage, and the climax (with a pair of foldouts on the sides of the pages) is filled with little gracenotes, like the bits of string that form the electric cables.

Click through below for some pix of my copy in action.

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I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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  • ncarp

    And we owe it all to Mike Mulligan whose steam shovel is now entombed beneath the town hall…

  • dr

    Is it available yet for the Kindle?

    • Anonymous

      Made me laugh out loud.

  • Ruadhan

    This reminds me of Crumb’s “Short History of America”.

    http://www.crumbproducts.com/files/A-SHORT-HISTORY-OF-AMERICA-.jpg

  • dme3ha

    beautiful. my 3 yrs-old son would go crazy all over it…with his hotwheels, wrecking every bit of it. love it..

  • Brainspore

    my 3 yrs-old son would go crazy all over it…with his hotwheels, wrecking every bit of it.

    That just adds to the realism! How many nice cities have been ruined by automobile traffic?

  • Anonymous

    Ncarp: Of course the Virginia Lee burton book that I’m reminded of is The Little House

  • jeligula

    There needs to be an expansion pack wherein the County Commissioners claim Eminent Domain on the central farm, take it from the owners for pennies on the dollar and turn it into a strip mall.

    • Anonymous

      I was just going to say, those older buildings would be totally demolished to make way for something new and ugly in most municipalities…

  • Atvaark

    Take the book outside on a sunny day, grab a magnifying glass, and you’re ready to simulate Sim City 2K’s microwave plant beam alignment disaster!

  • b3rt

    I can’t wait till I take my friends iguana and re-inact Godzilla.