Most indie authors know print-on-demand. Pop-up and movable books inhabit a very different world — one of hand-assembly, specialist printers, and minimum print runs that make the economics unlike anything in standard publishing. In this episode, Anna Featherstone talks with Kelli Anderson, paper engineer and author of Alphabet in Motion, about what it actually takes to bring a movable book to life. They cover the manufacturing process, working with printers, using Kickstarter to fund a 25,000-copy print run, and where a curious author might begin if this form is calling to them.
Listen to the Podcast: Pop-Up Books
Show Notes
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About the Host
Anna Featherstone is ALLi’s nonfiction adviser and an author advocate and mentor. A judge of The Australian Business Book Awards and Australian Society of Travel Writers awards, she’s also the founder of Bold Authors and presents author marketing and self-publishing workshops for organizations, including Byron Writers Festival. Anna has authored books including how-to and memoirs and her book Look-It’s Your Book! about writing, publishing, marketing, and leveraging nonfiction is on the Australian Society of Authors recommended reading list. When she’s not being bookish, Anna’s into bees, beings, and the big issues of our time.
About the Guest
Kelli Anderson uses handheld revelations to reconnect people with the depth and possibility of their world. Her books force readers to touch grass paper. She created This Book is a Camera (MoMA)—which transforms into a working camera—and This Book is a Planetarium (Chronicle)—which houses paper devices (including a planetarium) and has sold more than 100,000 copies. Alphabet in Motion, an interactive book about typography and technology, was published to wide acclaim in the Fall of 2025. The Washington Post book editor writes that “the work of literature that delighted me most this year is this pop-up book.” Other projects include a viral paper record player and—with The Yes Men—a utopian counterfeited New York Times, which won the Ars Electronica Prix. Doctors without Borders have used the award-winning Tinybop Human Body app she illustrated to communicate illness and treatment nonverbally to their patients in remote areas. Clients include NPR, The New Yorker, The Guggenheim, MoMA, Apple, and the New York Times. She has been nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award twice and teaches at NYU, SVA, and Cooper Union. You can find Kelli on her website and on Instagram.
Read the Transcript
Anna Featherstone: Welcome, and thanks for tuning in from your special part of this beautiful planet. I'm Anna Featherstone, coming to you today from the lands of the Gadigal people, the original storytellers of this place. Today we're exploring a corner of book publishing that's fun, intriguing, and intricate, and might take you back to your childhood: the world of pop-up and movable books. But we're going to discover that there's nothing childish about paper engineering — that there's a world of books out there functioning as cameras, planetariums, musical instruments, and even working record players. Books that are genuine feats of engineering disguised as something you hold in your hands.
I'm excited because we have a very special guest, Kelli Anderson. Kelli, good morning, good evening — how are things?
Kelli Anderson: Hello! Good — I'm so happy to be here.
Anna Featherstone: You're a New York-based graphic designer and paper engineer, and your books have been published by MoMA, Chronicle Books, and more recently funded through a Kickstarter in a very big way. I'd love to know — how did you even get into this world?
How a Paper Record Player Led to a TED Talk
Kelli Anderson: It was a little bit by accident. I'm a practicing graphic designer, but I went to school for fine art, so I'm not afraid of materials, the third dimension, building ridiculous sculptural objects. Quite a few years ago, some friends of mine — both musicians — asked me to make their wedding invitation. I had this wild memory from when I was five, watching a kids' science show where they made a record player out of paper: paper, a sewing needle, held up against the record, and that's enough to amplify the encoded sound information in the groove into the realm of audibility.
My friends and I thought this was really cool, so we made a paper record player wedding invitation, and I took a video of it. It went viral in a way I wasn't fully prepared for — it still doesn't entirely make sense to me. I got invited to give a TED Talk among other things, and I had the biggest imposter syndrome, because I kept thinking, do any of these people know this thing sounds really bad? You know how we always assume technology is going to get progressively better — better sound quality, better wish fulfillment — but people were still excited about it. I thought, oh, I think I've stumbled onto something interesting: we're really enamored with these lo-fi things that don't necessarily work in sophisticated ways, but that our eyes can follow, that make the world apparent and touchable and interactive to us. So I got into pop-ups through that weird back door — something proving to me that I didn't know about the world, and I've just been chasing that feeling ever since.
Anna Featherstone: Do you even remember, as a little child, having a pop-up book?
Kelli Anderson: I loved them. I feel like when you're a kid, everything is so magical — things you might think are just mildly cool as an adult are deeply magical as a child. I definitely remember pulling tabs on pop-ups over and over again. I might be an easily amused adult, and I was an even more easily amused child.
Anna Featherstone: I remember the simple kind — pull the tab and the sheep turns into a cow — and then the ones where a whole village pops up.
Kelli Anderson: Right.
This Book Is a Camera: A Working Pinhole Camera in a Book
Anna Featherstone: You take it to the next level — your books don't just pop up, they actually work. Tell us about This Book Is a Camera.
Kelli Anderson: This Book Is a Camera is an actual functioning pinhole camera. You open the book and something that looks like a camera pops up, but you can put photo paper in the back of it, lift a tab to expose the photo paper to light, and get a photograph. You have to develop it the old-fashioned way, with instant coffee and baking soda — but it really works. It's funny, because in art school everyone is forced to make a pinhole camera at some point, and it kind of changes your life. I really wanted to give people that magical moment, especially after everyone has been using the camera on their iPhone for so long — very high quality, but it doesn't connect you to the physicality of light, the fact that every beam of light carries an image.
This Book Is a Planetarium: From 26 Gadgets to Six
Anna Featherstone: Why did you decide to make This Book Is a Planetarium?
Kelli Anderson: I was coming off the success of the record player and thought: what other technologies can I pare down to their bare paper minimum? I made about 26 different gadgets — a periscope, a little animation machine, all sorts of things that didn't make it into the book. I pitched it to a publisher who'd actually approached me for something totally different — they wanted illustration work on another book, which didn't interest me — but I said, I have an idea for a book I really want to make. They said, cool, let's do it. They picked their six favorite contraptions, all things that connect people to concepts they've heard of but don't really understand — encryption is a good example. We all hear about our credit cards being encrypted, but what does that even mean? If you play with a decoder machine and make secret messages for a friend, you get a tangible, firsthand sense of the basis of that technology.
The planetarium is the best thing in the book, which is why it's called This Book Is a Planetarium. It's a pop-up planetarium you use with the flashlight on your smartphone to project stars onto the ceiling, turning any room into a planetarium, letting you ponder how light travels across the universe over billions of years. I love that feeling of opening a book and feeling like an entire world has expanded in front of you. Books transport us and play with scale, and I'm really trying to make books that do that in a very dramatic way.
Anna Featherstone: You're mixing light, sound, mathematics. I just think of paper as paper, but you see it as so much more. Tell us about your relationship with paper.
Kelli Anderson: We live in this highly advanced technological society where no one expects anything from paper. But paper, like everything else, is undergirded by the laws of physics, and you can build things out of paper that tap into that infrastructure. When we talk about an interface, people don't think of paper as an interface — but you can use paper as an interface, to amplify sound, or fold a paper airplane and interact with air pressure and the breeze. Things you normally can't interact with directly, paper can bring into your hand and make into something you can design for, play with, and tinker with. That aspect of paper is really important to me.
Alphabet in Motion: A Kickstarter After a Publisher Fell Through
Anna Featherstone: Your latest book — tell us about that. Am I right that it's an indie book, since you went via Kickstarter, or is it with a publisher as well?
Kelli Anderson: It's interesting, because I started with a publisher — they actually approached me to make the book. But it turned out they were a newer publisher who had signed contracts with a whole bunch of authors and didn't really follow through. I was waiting on proofreading, approvals on meetings and formats, and eventually I broke up with them after three years because it seemed like a strange situation.
It was a really ambitious project to do as an individual — that's an understatement, because this kind of book is such a big undertaking that most publishers wouldn't even take it on. It seemed like too much material risk to get all the bells and whistles made for printing. So I sat down and thought: I still want to make this book, and I guess I'll have to do a Kickstarter — and I won't be able to make it unless the Kickstarter raises a quarter of a million dollars. That seemed like a long shot, but I was excited enough about the book to think maybe I could get there. And it made that much, so I went ahead and made the book.
Anna Featherstone: Oh my goodness — that's a whole other level. Describe the book to us.
Kelli Anderson: It's a book that explains how letters get their shape. It's a pop-up book, and all the letters A through Z pop up, each diving into different aspects of typographic and design history. Most people have used Microsoft Word or Google Docs, and every time you set type you have to choose a typeface — and I think most people's relationship with that decision is one of fear that they'll make the wrong choice. That fear indicates something: we all know these shapes mean something, there's history and meaning there, but it's a little obscured, so we never feel confident with it.
I have a degree in art history, and I'm used to looking at things like brushstrokes and architectural style and reading them as telling you something about the dreams, philosophies, and ideas of the person who made them. I think we pick up a lot of subconscious aesthetic messages from type too — you see a groovy, warpy letterform from the '60s and you think of go-go dancers, The Velvet Underground, one of Andy Warhol's light projections. We have real emotional and intuitive information about type, but not much actual history. Part of why people don't know where those feelings come from is that so much of the technology used to produce letterforms historically is now obsolete, and it's hard to get excited about a topic built around a machine you can't actually play with. So I thought: this is a great topic for me to explore using pop-ups and different paper contraptions.
Running a Quarter-Million-Dollar Kickstarter
Anna Featherstone: All the different letters move and take shape — you've created a history project and an art project at once. And then you had to run the Kickstarter, which raised a quarter of a million dollars — that's a lot of people to deal with, a lot of pressure. What did you learn from running it?
Kelli Anderson: So much. It's really hard to run a Kickstarter — not just the video, which everyone knows is hard, or fulfillment, which everyone also knows is hard. It's also hard to figure out taxes, because you basically get a 1099 saying you made a quarter of a million dollars that year, even though most of it went straight to your printer.
It's also kind of incredible how good the world's postal services are at losing five-pound books. I mail letters all the time and they always arrive — but as soon as something is heavy, it seems to fall off the back of a truck. I flew to the UK and mailed about 400 packages from London — had them sent from the printer directly to a port in the UK, though somehow they ended up in Manchester, so I had to drive there. The Royal Mail lost about a quarter of them.
Anna Featherstone: Maybe there are royals sitting around reading your book right now.
Kelli Anderson: I'm honestly not sure. A lot of people in the US complain about our postal service, but they did a fantastic job by comparison — they lost some, but not nearly as many.
Anna Featherstone: How many books did you have to send out altogether?
Kelli Anderson: I've sent out over 4,000 books since they arrived in October. That's a lot of shipping, and I've definitely had help. It's almost like planning to go to war — getting a post office imprint, a deal with a commercial mailing facility, tons of boxes. If anyone's planning a Kickstarter: get your printer to send the books already packed in mailing boxes. It ends up costing about the same and saves you a ton of time and headaches. That was great advice from a friend.
How Pop-Up Books Are Actually Made — by Hand
Anna Featherstone: On a project like that, who actually assembles the pop-up books? Is it machines, people, or both?
Kelli Anderson: I'm so glad you asked, because before I ever worked on a pop-up book, I assumed there were robots or conveyor belts doing all the folding and assembling. As it turns out, they're made by hand — a lot of things people assume are machine-made are actually handmade. There's a lot of talk right now about AI taking people's jobs, but machines really aren't good at this kind of fine motor skill work. If you've ever learned to knit, that muscle memory of how you make the stitches — that's hard to teach a machine. A knitting machine doing the same stitch over and over is easy to build, but a pop-up book is different every time, different for every spread. It doesn't really make sense to build a machine for it when people are so good at it already.
Anna Featherstone: How did you find the people and the company you use — is there an association for paper engineers, or a pop-up association?
Kelli Anderson: There's a wonderful group called the Movable Book Society — paper engineers, pop-up people, people interested in studying Victorian cards, librarians, collectors. It's one of the few groups I'm part of that's genuinely diverse — young people into origami joining alongside elder statesmen of the field.
When I started this process, finding a printer for a book like this is a real long shot. I'd first worked with the company that printed This Book Is a Planetarium, Toppan Leefung, based in China, but they weren't taking on new pop-up books — just continuing to print what they already had in production. So I had to find another printer. I emailed friends in the Movable Book Society asking who to reach out to, and that's how I found my current printer — people were so emphatic that I contact a man named Jackie Lu. He's a printer in China, and he organized the whole project. I've flown over there a couple of times now, so we've actually gotten to know each other, which is good, because we spent years setting up the production together.
Anna Featherstone: What kind of minimum print run makes a pop-up viable?
Kelli Anderson: It depends. Plenty of pop-up books are made in small editions, like 1,000 copies — you want the smallest edition that makes sense, because you don't want to end up with books nobody wants. But this book was so big that we needed a large run just to make it economical and bring the price down. Part of what I tried to do was get as many backers on the Kickstarter as possible, and part of what my distributor did was bring it to book fairs around the world and show it to booksellers, who would tell them how many orders they expected. In the case of Barnes and Noble, their order essentially set the size of our print run — we were waiting for them to give us a number, and once they did, we printed 25,000 copies, which is enormous. It was very expensive, but we made it work. It honestly felt like a house of cards that could have fallen apart at any second — my life was full-time work on this book.
Anna Featherstone: What a scary, creative, fabulous adventure. And the beauty of it is that the book will have such a long tail — it can keep selling for ten or twenty years, maybe become a collector's edition, because it's so unique and rooted in history, which gives it its own long history.
Type as a Human Craft — and What AI Might Change
Kelli Anderson: So much about how type appears in our lives has to do with the tool that made it — a brush stroke, a calligraphy pen, and now computers. Typefaces are designed digitally now, and the technology is changing very quickly. That's the one thing I might need to update in a future edition, because throughout type's history people have talked a lot about automating things, since it's so labor-intensive. Think about writing your name with movable type — taking out wooden blocks for each letter. It takes a long time, and even longer for a newspaper, magazine, or book. There's been a long thread of interest in automating typesetting, and that's reached a fever pitch now with AI.
But type is so beholden to the odd quirks of human perception that you really need a human being dialing everything in to make it harmonious — when computers try, they're just not as good. That was one of the overarching conclusions of the book: people don't think to look at type and type design as something irreducibly human. You think of it as technical or practical, but it's really a very touchy-feely, perceptual craft discipline. I hope that craft is preserved going forward, though I might have to revisit the book in a few years to see how the technology has moved.
Anna Featherstone: For authors listening, we're always obsessing over what font to use in our books so they look great for readers — it's fascinating to think about the decisions made to create those fonts in the first place.
Kelli Anderson: It's so cool. Just to give a shout-out — the essays in the book are set in a typeface called Tiempos, from Klim Type Foundry. They're in New Zealand, and they're excellent. There are several typefaces used throughout the book, but in terms of legibility, that's the one I really like.
Getting Started: Is Paper Engineering Accessible?
Anna Featherstone: For any creator who's wildly inspired now or wants to dive in — is there a genuinely accessible entry point to paper engineering, or does it require lots of specialist knowledge from day one?
Kelli Anderson: If you can build a prototype, you can probably find a printer that will do it. I like to tell people: if a printer says they can't do it, just keep asking more printers. As for learning the skills, there's a great YouTube channel run by a man named Duncan Birmingham — I think it's called the Pop-Up Book Channel. He has about a hundred tutorials on different paper mechanisms. If you went through all of those, you'd know pretty much everything I know. People also just take apart other pop-up books to see how they work — the same mechanisms get used in creative ways, remixed and combined. There are things called V-folds, things called layers, and you nest layers on top of V-folds to get different effects. It's not like music with infinite notes and tones — there's a fairly limited vocabulary of mechanisms. Learn the base mechanisms and you know what everyone else knows; it's about creatively wielding them. The best way to learn how is to take apart other people's pop-up books and spy on what they're doing.
Anna Featherstone: I love that there's this whole world of pop-up people out there — all these people with a passion for it. What's the biggest pitfall you've found working with pop-up books?
The Economics: Making Pop-Up Books Affordable
Kelli Anderson: The hardest thing is making them affordable, because there's so much handwork involved. A book is expensive to print, die-cutting is expensive, and the most expensive thing is having skilled people assemble it. There used to be more places in the US that manufactured pop-up books — there's one left in Connecticut called Structural Graphics. But with the economics of global manufacturing, when I had 1,000 copies of the camera book made there, I could only sell them for the same price they cost to produce. I basically risked losing all the production money and gaining nothing, but I thought, these will sell, and took the risk.
That turned out to be a good risk, because MoMA — the Museum of Modern Art here — saw the book and said they wanted to republish it, but they were going to have it made by their person in Hong Kong rather than in Connecticut. That was my first introduction to printers in that region. There are excellent printers throughout Asia willing to do complicated handwork — a few in the US can handle small runs, like 200 wedding invitations or holiday cards, but for something mass-produced and distributed to stores that needs to be affordable for as many people as possible, it makes sense to work with a printer overseas.
I don't know how interesting this is to everyone, but I feel like I'm in on a little secret history of the world — I've literally been on container ships. It's been such an amazing learning experience and field trip, even if it felt high-stakes and stressful. I'm just a person, and if I can do it, other people can do it. If I'm encouraging anyone to quit a day job they don't like, then I'm happy with that.
Anna Featherstone: That's half the fun of being indie authors too — the journey, the challenge, being able to be creative in the way we want, learning, getting better, exploring. I was going to ask what you love most about what you do, but I think you've told us throughout. What do you love most?
What Drives Her: Proving the Impossible Is Possible
Kelli Anderson: I've thought about this a lot, because it's definitely not money — I wish I were more driven by practical things. I think what really excites me is the limits of what's possible. Especially if people tell me something is impossible, and I can see a way it might actually be possible, it's almost irresistible to prod at it and see if I can make it happen. That goes all the way down to the handcraft level — can I use this material, paper, that people assume can't do anything, to play a record? I think I can, and then I tinker with it until it works.
And a lot of major publishers like to say, well, you just can't make books like that, the economics are impossible, mass production makes it impossible — and I like to see if that's actually true. It's a little risky, but it's irresistible.
Anna Featherstone: That sounds exactly like how you roll. I love it. This conversation has had my brain going pop, pop, pop — it's so fun to talk to someone exploring and doing such cool stuff. Where can people find you, your books, and learn more about everything you do?
Where to Find Kelli and Her Books
Kelli Anderson: You can find me at kellianderson.com — Kelli with an I. Everything else is as expected. I'm also on Instagram as Kelli Anderson. I'm an early adopter, so just look for Kelli Anderson with an I on any social media platform and it's probably me.
The books are theoretically in stores around the world now. Alphabet in Motion is distributed by D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers), so it should be available there. If not, it's for sale on my website, though shipping costs are high these days, so I'd encourage people to try a local bookstore first. This Book Is a Camera is nowhere right now, but we'll have it back in the world in a couple of weeks — copies are landing at the Port of New York, and we'll distribute from there.
Anna Featherstone: Is that going through a publisher again, or are you doing that edition as an indie?
Kelli Anderson: Doing it as an indie. It's funny — since I'd worked with a publisher on Alphabet in Motion for so long, D.A.P. encouraged me by saying it doesn't matter whether you work with a publisher or not, customers don't care, we don't care, no one cares. But I'd been through all the bad parts of working with a publisher, so I wanted to do it on my own terms — though I did want a sort of imprint indicating a collaboration. Technically the publisher is Catherine Small Gallery, but in real life Catherine Small Gallery is my friend Michael, who owns a fantastic typography-focused bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's technically the publisher, but he doesn't really do anything — so it's even more indie than it sounds. It worked out so well that he said sure, Catherine Small Gallery can publish This Book Is a Camera too.
Anna Featherstone: Creative in every way. We'll put those links in the show notes so people can find you. Thank you so much for joining us, Kelli.
Kelli Anderson: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me — and sorry that I'm not properly dressed.
Anna Featherstone: That's okay, no one needs to know. And to all of you out there listening, whatever you're dreaming or writing or creating — thank you for being a very special part of our ALLi podcast family. I'm Anna Featherstone. Here's to you and your projects. Get popping, people. Best wishes to everyone, and thanks again, Kelli.
Kelli Anderson: Thank you so much, Anna.
