Museum Will Be 'Popping' Starting This Weekend [VIDEO]

Elaine Schofield was dropping off some puppets at Wenham Museum about a year ago when she starting chatting with exhibitions curator Jane Bowers.

"How many pop-up books do you have?' Bowers asked Schofield.

"About 1,300," Schofield said.

That conversation gave birth to the museum's latest exhibit in the Thompson Gallery "Pop Goes the Book! Favorites from the Elaine Schofield Collection"

It will open on Friday with a members-only cocktail reception celebrating the opening of the museum’s two spring exhibits - the pop-up book exhibit and "Draw Me a Story: Paper Monsters from Ed and Rebecca Emberely" on Friday, March 15 from 6–8 p.m.

Schofield has been collecting pop-up books for more than 20 years and includes books dating back to the 1930s up to today.

While pop-up books have been around for centuries, they first became commercially popular in the 1930s with the Bookano series.

"That was one of the first that was popular," Bowers said during a preview tour of the exhibit on Tuesday.

The uses of the term "favorites" in the exhibit name shows how the exhibit was developed. Schofield chose about 100 of her favorites and even all those will likely not be on display.

While books date back to the Bookano series, they also extend to modern-day pop-up authors Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart.

"Making them is extremely complex," Bowers said, noting that while the paper is most modern pop-up books is cut by machine, the books are still glued together by hand. "That is why pop-up books are so expensive because every one of them has to be touched by human hands."

The exhibit runs through June 9 with a Family-Friendly Exhibit Reception on Sunday, March 24 from 1-3:30 p.m.