Pop-up book entrepreneur Waldo Hunt dies

PORTERVILLE, Calif., Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Waldo Hunt, the man almost single-handedly responsible for the post-World War II revival of the pop-up book, has died in California, his family said.

He was 88.

Hunt, of Springville, who died of congestive heart failure at a Porterville, Calif., hospital Nov. 6, produced many of the best-known pop-up books of the 20th century.

They included "The Human Body" by Jonathan Miller and David Pelham, which featured movable internal organs, "The Honeybee and the Robber" by Eric Carle and the pop-up version of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."

"Pull a tab ... in any of Wally's books, and Disneyland appears," David Zeidberg, library director at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., told the Los Angeles Times.

Besides working for commercial publishers, Hunt produced pop-up books, greeting cards, table decorations and store displays for clients including the National Geographic Society, Hallmark Cards and Walt Disney Co., The New York Times said.

Hunt was born in Chicago Nov. 28, 1920, grew up in California, served in the U.S. Army during World War II and went into advertising after the war.

Later disenchanted with the industry, he became mesmerized by a children's pop-up book from Czechoslovakia displayed in a New York City toy store window in the mid-1950s, the Los Angeles Times said.

"I knew I'd found the magic key," Hunt told the newspaper in 2002. "No one was doing pop-ups in this country. No one could afford to make them here. They had to be done by hand, and labor was too expensive."

Hunt formed Graphics International and took the book assembly work abroad, first to Japan and later to Latin America, where costs were lower.

He got his big break when Graphics International secured a contract to produce "Bennett Cerf's Pop-Up Riddles" in 1965, the Los Angeles Times said.