Spooky House of Horror, Charles Fuge (Konemann, 1998)

I found this wonderful pop-up book in an upstairs room tonight.

I had been thrift-storing a lot in the past few years and now it's like going shopping when I enter the rooms where I stored up my secondhand (or fiftiethhand) booty!

I took some photos of some rooms of the haunted house which is this book. Apologies that these photos are not the best, but they give you some idea of the great eye and whimsy of the book's designer, Charles Fuge.

The book has two red ribbons you can tie off. When the book is closed up, these seem de trop.

But when you open the book, you soon realize there's a reason they're there; the book is a book "in the round." You open the book like a centerpiece decoration until the front cover and the back cover meet. Then you use those red ribbons to tie the covers tightly together so the floors of the various rooms will descend correctly.

Then you can poke around in this really delightful (and not too scary really--the target audience is clearly younger kids) haunted house.

There are well over a dozen interactive features. Pull this tab and a spooky chandelier descends. Pull that tab and a vampire (see photo) swiftly rises up from his coffin in one downstairs room.

I love the mutant bug kitchen!

You should see the horror in the oven when you open it. It looks like an ax murderer might have been cooking "his work."

There are trap doors and even a turnstile bookcase (Scooby Roo!!).

There's even a little piece of acetate that hangs down from one high ceiling and reflects a ghost, making him truly transparent (or a transparency lol?)

Of course, click on the pictures above to enlarge them and see these details.

The Moon Man all by himself in the one photo is up in a slot near the roof of the house.

He's actually a little flat book.

Inside I found paper cutout figures--one adult male (the author?) and one child (his son?)

The little book gives you a spooky narrative and some facts and pointers about the house.

It's an oversize book, of course, fifteen inches tall--the height of your haunted house.

It was printed by Konemann in Koln, Germany. In 1998.

I think it's really gorgeous, as pop-up books go.