A WORK OF ART. VISUAL LITERATURE. Literary performance art. However you define it, Nick Bantock's new book Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence (Chronicle/Raincoast $19.95) is completely original. Designed as a pop-up book for adults, it doubles as a haunting story about a lonely artist living in London who receives letters and post cards from a mysterious woman, Sabine, living on an island in the South Pacific. Somehow she knows his art as well as he does, although they have never met. Bantock, who has created several bestselling pop-up books for children, has adapted his expertise for Griffin and Sabine. Each page contains a post card, or a letter complete with envelope. You remove the letter from the envelope some are 'handwritten' and some typed complete with spelling mistakes and read it. Bantock lives on Bowen Island, off Vancouver, where the residents pick up their mail at the post office. "Everyone knows everyone on the island so we look over our neighbours' shoulders to see what they got. Every time someone got a letter from some exotic location with its foreign stamp I would let out a little sigh, and I thought: 'other people must feel the way I do too; everyone loves to get a great letter.'" It was a short step from there to conceiving the story line "which is basically about the male/female natures in a single individual". Bantock also drew some inspiration from a poem by Yeats, lines of which are buried in the text or pictures, like clues in a detective story. But Bantock deliberately made the plot cryptic. He hints that the Yeats poem contains clues to what happens to Griffin and Sabine. "I don't fill in the missing spaces. People have to think to do that." Griffin and Sabine is the first book of a trilogy, and the next one is due out a year from now.

NICK BANTOCK WORKS with Intervisual Communications of Los Angeles, which make 75 per cent of the pop-up books in the world. Creating these books is a time-consuming collaboration between Bantock as artist and Intervisual's 'paper mechanics'. First Bantock works out an idea on paper then builds a mock-up of his proposed book. He sends this to Los Angeles where the paper mechanics refine his work, because each pop up character must have as few' glue points' as possible or the cost of the book skyrockets. The paper mechanics send back a totally white working mockup of the book for Bantock to check. When he is satisfied he tells them to have the templates made. The cut-outs must be laid out in such a way as to waste the least possible paper. The printers then run off the flats and these are checked for errors. Then they are cut out and manually assembled and glued into the books. In the case of Griffin and Sabine, each envelope was stuffed and glued into place by hand. The first printing of this book totals 40,000.
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