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| Believe it or not every, single piece in Robert Sabuda's pop-up book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is folded and glued by hand. This process is called hand assembly and takes place in South America or Asia. |
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was hand assembled at a company called Excel located in Hong Kong and in Pan Yu, China. Excel has been producing books for young readers for over 10 years and crafts some of the most complex pop-up books in the world. |
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Inside Excel's Pan Yu headquarters, thousands of hand assemblers begin the process of taking hundreds of thousands of small, cut pieces of paper and turning them into finished pop-up books. |
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| Glue is made right at Excel in large drums and then poured into small, red pots. The glue is water-based with just a bit of rubber added to make clean up easier. When the pot is not being used, plastic wrap is draped across the top to prevent it from drying out. |
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Brushes are used to apply the glue to each individual pop-up piece. The brushes come in a variety of sizes depending on how large the pop-up is that the glue is being applied to. |
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If there is a REALLY big area that needs to be covered with glue brushes aren't used at all. The glue is poured into a fine, silk screen which has an area masked out that will only let the glue flow to a specified area. This silk screen is being used to apply the glue to the cover of Alice's Adventures. |
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| The hand assemblers sit side by side at long tables. The pop-up starts it's journey at one end of the table as just a jumble of paper pieces but when it reaches the other end it will be a finished pop-up! These assemblers are building the rabbit from the famous tea party scene. |
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A small mountain of the same pop-up piece is placed at each table, in this case, the rabbit's chair. The assembler takes the chair ... |
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...turns it over and carefully applies glue to the back with a brush ... |
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