Remembrances
November 24, 2009
Waldo Hunt: 1920-2009
The 'King of the Pop-Ups' Made Books Spring to Life
By Stephen Miller
An impresario of printed extravaganzas, Waldo Hunt led a renaissance of pop-up books.
Mr. Hunt, who died Nov. 7 at age 88, was a one-time advertising executive who developed a specialty in creating pop-up magazine inserts. But what started as eye-catching marketing for Wrigley's gum and Dodge pickup trucks grew into a literary subgenre.
Fascinated by what had become a lost art in the U.S. by the 1960s, Mr. Hunt built on his experience developing pop-up marketing materials into a focus on books. While not an artist himself, Mr. Hunt was adept at coordinating the complex process of assembling the books, from design to production and assembly. Leading publishing houses including Random House hired him to package pop-up titles for adults and children.
The companies he founded, Graphics International and Intervisual Books, produced hundreds of books, including some that were translated into more than a dozen languages. "King of the pop-ups" became Mr. Hunt's moniker in professional circles.
Mr. Hunt produced dozens of books for Walt Disney; a series based on Babar; and popular titles including "Haunted House" and "The Human Body." A 1967 pop-up published by Random House, "Andy Warhol's Index," came about at the suggestion of the artist. It combined celebrity photos with pop-up versions of signature Warhol touches like a cardboard can of tomato paste.
Babar. I read Babar to my kids.
"He single-handedly kept the torch of pop-up books alive from the 1960s through the 1990s," says Robert Sabuda, the best-selling creator of elaborate children's pop-up books. "Those of us who are in the newer generation of pop-up books would have no career without Wally Hunt."
Though pop-ups had flourished in Germany and Britain in the 19th century, and gained a following in the U.S. in the 1930s, they were little known in the post-World War II era.
"No one was doing pop-ups in this country," Mr. Hunt told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. "No one could afford to make them here."
Pop-up books allowed Mr. Hunt to combine his love of exuberant design with his overseas production contacts cultivated from his work in advertising. To save on labor costs, he had his early books assembled in Japan; production later moved to Singapore and to Latin America. Design was handled by a coterie of independent artists whom Mr. Hunt called "paper engineers" for their skill at unfurling three-dimensional figures from flat paper.
The son of a Unitarian minister and a music teacher, Mr. Hunt grew up in Salt Lake City and southern California, and served in the infantry during World War II.
After the war, he opened an advertising agency in Los Angeles, specializing in high-quality printed materials. He sold his first agency in 1956, and founded Graphics International Inc., to serve as a broker between Japanese printers and U.S. clients.
Mr. Hunt described his infatuation with pop-up books as a bolt from the blue. One day in the early 1960s while walking down New York's Fifth Avenue, he spotted a pop-up book in a shop window.
"I could look at that children's book from Czechoslovakia and see in it my answer," Mr. Hunt told the Los Angeles Times. "I knew I'd found the magic key."
After his bid to import a large number books by the book's Czech artist, Vojtech Kubasta, was thwarted by Communist authorities, Mr. Hunt turned to producing them himself. The first was a promotional volume produced in conjunction with Random House for Maxwell House Coffee, "Bennett Cerf's Pop-Up Riddle Book," which customers could receive by sending in two can labels and $1.
Bennett Cerf, Random House's top editor, put his son Christopher in charge of the project.
"You'd pull a tab and something funny would happen, and the answer to the riddle would be revealed," Christopher Cerf recalled in an interview. The younger Mr. Cerf and Mr. Hunt went on to produce about 30 more children's pop-up books for Random House, including volumes featuring Sesame Street characters. In his memoir "At Random," Bennett Cerf described the pop-up books as big money makers.
Mr. Hunt "was a joyful man," says Christopher Cerf. "Sometimes to his own detriment, he took on huge, crazy projects. Nothing was impossible."
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