Massimo Missiroli
I’m a pop-up designer and I design pop-up books, but my real life, the one that gave me a salary, was working as a part-time bank teller in the mornings for 43 years. Then in the afternoons and in my spare time I had this great adventure, which has been going on for 50 years in the world of paper, making over 30 pop-up books sold all over the world. I’m one of 30 pop-up designers around the world designing this kind of book and currently one of the 10 who publishes 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 there are more copies that I give away than those that I sell because I like to advertise not myself but pop-up books themselves.
The first pop-up is never forgotten. I saw it in a bookshop in Forlì. It was by the German Ernest Nister, a publisher who at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries published three-dimensional books with a very well-finished aesthetic. I was struck by it and since then I have started collecting these paper engineering works by putting together one of the most significant collections in the world, with over 5000 titles in over 3 centuries of history.
