Page 97 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Lothar Meggendorfer: Books as toy theatre: International Circus pop-up book (1887)
Of course, the experimentation with the form and format of the book began much earlier than the 19th century - In his 13th century book Ars Brevis, Ramon Llull had included his Llullian Circle - a ‘paper- machine’ or ‘memory wheel’ comprising concentric circles each independently rotatable around their common axis - it was effectively a ‘kinetic memory device’ - prototype paper-computer designed by Llull . This kind of paper-machine was further explored by Giordano Bruno in the 16th century and appeared as part of Kabbalistic numerological studies. In the 19th century, before Meggandorfer, books were published containing illustrated plates that could be detached and propped-up to refer too while reading the book - (sometimes these removable plates were printed with cut-out dolls and various costumes relevant to the story). But Meggandorfer is the true master of paper-engineering from mid-19th century onwards.
I love the idea that a pop-up book could transmute into a theatre, a medieval castle, an ocean liner, a farm-yard, the Little Big-Horn, a Pirate’s treasure-cave, - or a circus - whatever the child and the book- designers and paper-engineers could dream up as a venue for creative play mixed with narrative texts and storytelling. In the early 1990s, with the then current popularity of CDROM as a publishing medium, Bob Stein’s Voyager Company published several-dozen ‘expanded books’, as digital multimedia creations including some children’s works such as Rodney Greenblatt’s excellent Dazzleoids - with interactive texts and illustrations that invited not just reading, but reading and play....