John
Strejan, Wizard of the Pop-Up Book, Dies at 70
April 17,
2003
By EDEN
ROSS LIPSON
John
Strejan, who earned the nickname Silverblade
for his mastery of paper engineering
in designing complicated and fanciful pop-up
books for children and adults, died in Los Angeles on March 26. He was 70.
The cause was cancer, said his daughter
Stephanie Strejan-Schwartz.
Mr. Strejan (the name is pronounced STREE-jen) was an artist from childhood,
who discovered that he could figure out how things worked and then draw
them with a knife. His nickname referred to his dazzling speed and skill
with an X-Acto blade.
There are only a few dozen paper engineers
in the world, all self-taught.
It is hard not to marvel when a flat book opens and out comes a fully
rigged galleon, a half-dozen
dinosaurs or a breathing coral
reef with eels
swimming through the lacy boughs; pulling tabs can make shells open or tentacles
wave. But the exacting mechanics of how it is done are hard to explain.
"I took paper, smashed it in a book and saw how it folded," he once
said of his early experiments.
Complex constructions like Mr. Strejan's, which must be assembled, slotted in,
and glued by hand, contain hundreds of individual pieces of paper, each precisely
cut to fit and fold exactly, and hundreds of glue
points.
Books with moveable parts can be traced to the 1300's, but the 19th-century
Germans Ernest
Nister and Lothar
Meggendorfer are credited with the modern form, which then languished until
the 1960's.
Robert Sabuda, an author and illustrator of recent pop-up titles like "The
12 Days of Christmas: A Pop-Up Celebration," called Mr. Strejan "a
grand master of the generation when pop-up books entered their second golden
age." Mr. Sabuda said Mr. Strejan's work "is so good that today I
still can't figure out how to do some of it."
Mr. Strejan was born in Detroit
and grew up in Portland, Ore. He
moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for advertising agencies and was also
art director for Teen magazine and Bullocks
department store.
His first three-dimensional projects were done for the
Elgin Davis Art Studio. Mr. Davis was a founder of Graphics
International, designers and producers of a new line of pop-books in the
late 1960's, which required hand assembly. It later became Intervisual
Books, one of the leaders in the field today.
Among the titles that established Mr. Strejan's international reputation were
the large-format collection "The
Sailing Ships" (1984) and "The
Facts of Life" (also 1984), by Dr.
Jonathan Miller, an educational
book for adults and children that was memorable for its inclusion of anatomically
complete human genitalia; both were published by Viking.
From 1987 to 1989 Mr. Strejan engineered a National Geographic series on animals,
including "Strange
Animals of the Sea."
Mr. Strejan was married
four times, most recently two days before he died to his companion of 17
years, Patricia Kroon. He is survived by four daughters from previous marriages,
Ms. Strejan-Schwartz, Sabrina Sciacca, Heather Romano and Shannon Praytchl;
two stepdaughters, Diane Umberger and Stacey Palmisano; a brother, Gene; and
five grandchildren.
In addition to creating more than 50 books, Mr. Strejan, who reveled in the
freelance life,
continued to do paper engineering for advertising displays like a pop-up version
of the Magic Castle for
Disney, a pop-up
of the Getty Museum and posters for the movie "Toy
Story."
Mr. Strejan's last project for Intervisual Books, which sold about 500,000 copies
in 13 countries, was "Choo-Choo
Charlie: The Littletown Train" (1998; distributed in the United States
by PiggyToes Press), a cardboard book and play set with a pop-up village and
a wind-up train. And, it whistles.
Copyright 2003 New York Times (Registration required)
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