Aa to Zz: A Pop-Up Alphabet

by David Hawcock, David Hawcock (Illustrator)

Overview

A lovely, highly designed way to learn the ABCs
 
This little pop-up alphabet book is a triumph of design. Open each of the 26 spreads and a white letter emerges against a colored background. The text is a simple capital and small letter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781857078091
Publisher:	Tango Books
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Pages:	52
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 4.80(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	3 - 5 Years

About the Author

David Hawcock is a paper engineer whose pop-up titles include The Amazing Pop-up, Pull-out Space Shuttle, and The Pop-Up Book of Ships.

Editorial Reviews

07/06/2015
A cousin to books like Marion Bataille’s ABC3D and Christopher Franceschelli’s Alphablock, this diminutive pop-up tour of the alphabet features understated paper engineering, an intriguing interplay of colors, and a disciplined design. Capital and lower-case letters appear on white right-hand pages, while the left-hand pages are printed in milky shades of blue, green, gold, and red. The colors help define the shapes of the pop-up letters that emerge, such as the bridge of an H or the spiky central points of an M or W. Hawcock reduces each letter to its simplest, most elemental form—his X is essentially just a pinched square—in this fresh, modern abecedary. Ages 3–5. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"[a] fresh, modern abecedary" —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2015-07-22
Twenty-six pop-up letters—both resolutely minimalist and a tour de force of paper design. Gathered into a small, square volume, the pop-up letters are all capitals and take up one spread each with printed capital and lowercase characters in the lower corner. The rectos are all white, the versos a solid color that is often echoed in the architectural counters or eyes in the central figures. Sometimes, though, Hawcock only suggests his letterforms with cut edges and negative spaces; a technique that works nicely for "C" and "E" but leaves "K" just a set of abstract angles and "R" with a solid top and no distinct lower leg. He also makes inventive use of origami folds—earning style points with reverse-folded colored counters for "B" and "O," for instance, and crafting "X" simply from the unmarked top ridges of a water bomb base. Readers may be drawn to this as a sometimes-challenging exercise in letter recognition, but it also provides food for thought about ways in which artists can get away from drawn lines and use space, straight or curved edges, and color to create a broad range of forms. An ingenious, if unevenly successful, showpiece. (Pop-up alphabet book. 3 & up)

Kirkus Reviews