The adventures of a pop-up designer

Massimo Missiroli

I'm a pop-up designer and I design pop-up books , but my real life, the one that paid me, was working as a part-time bank teller in the mornings, for 43 years. Then in the afternoons and in my free time I had this great adventure, which has been lasting for 50 years in the world of paper, creating over 30 pop-ups sold all over the world. I am one of the 30 pop-up designers in the world who design this type of book and currently one of the 10 who publish the most.

I wrote a biography about my life as a pop-up designer and many anecdotes about the publishing and paper world. The book is sold on Amazon (and you can find it HERE ) but I give away more copies than I sell because I like to advertise not for myself but for pop-up books .

You never forget the first pop-up. I saw it in a bookshop in Forlì. It was by the German Ernest Nister, a publisher who published three-dimensional books with a highly refined aesthetic between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was struck by it and since then I started collecting these works of paper engineering, putting together one of the most significant collections in the world, with over 5000 titles in over 3 centuries of history.