Popville is a sweet, slender little pop-up book that illustrates the growth of a town from a single farmhouse to a thriving city in a series of stylized scenes that build, one upon the next, through a window cut out of the center of the page, so that each development literally overlays the ones beneath. My toddler has fallen in love with the book and its additive scenes, and the grownups I've shown it to finds it equally fascinating. The cutaway in the book's center is a genuinely clever bit of business that creates a sense of time's passage, and the climax (with a pair of foldouts on the sides of the pages) is filled with little gracenotes, like the bits of string that form the electric cables.
Click through below for some pix of my copy in action.
