An Interview with Robert Sabuda, Part 1
By Barbara Valenta

Originally published in Movable Stationery, August 1999
Movable Stationery is a quarterly publication of The Movable Book Society

BV – Can you fill us in a little bit about your boyhood? Was there any indication then of what your future path would be? Were there any influences, role models, mentors?

RS – I grew up in a small town in rural Michigan. Pinkney, Michigan. I was always an artist, always drew and sketched. I wasn’t a very good painter. My mother was a secretary for Ford Motor Company and we didn’t have very much money. She would always bring home Ford Motor Company stationary for me, and sometimes she would bring home manila folders that had been used for something else – and at that time you could not get card stock – there just was no such thing – so that was great and I made my first pop-ups from those manila folders. In high school the teachers always asked me to do bulletin boards, which was fun. I used lots of cut paper and got a good introduction to paper that way. In high school my teacher told me – in this little town of rural Michigan she said to me, “You should go to Pratt. (Pratt Institute is a well known art school in Brooklyn.) She took me by the hand and guided me through all four years of high school showing me what it would take to live the life of an artist. And so I applied to Pratt. That was the only school I applied to. And after graduation I came to Pratt. My senior year at Pratt I did an internship at Dial Books for Young Readers and I really learned about publishing in general.

BV – Just general things or specific things?

RS – Well, I didn’t really know that pictures and words could go together. I hadn’t understood the idea of a book that, well…I saw some amazing original art for books there for the first time and that influenced me tremendously. At the age of twenty two you are supposed to decide what the heck you want to do and so I thought, “I could do this. I could make this happen.” I was always very interested in graphic design, graphic imagery. Pop-ups are very concrete. They either work or they don’t. So I finished my senior year at Pratt and geared everything towards book illustration. After that it took me ten years, ten long years (to become established in this field.)

BV – How did you earn a living during those years?

RS – Lots of freelance graphic work on the side, and I took all the illustration work I could get. Right after I got out of college I illustrated coloring books to make money. (I can’t believe I am telling you this!)

BV – That’s a hot tip. That’s very interesting.

RS – Even though it was coloring books I began to learn more about publishing. Things I didn’t know about distribution and what it meant when something was mass market. I hadn’t heard that term before.

BV – What were some of the elements of publishing that you learned that the average person on the street wouldn’t necessarily know?

BV – And are the financial returns on those two kinds of books the same, because you’d sell more mass market books?

RS – That is a good question. I think places like pharmacies don’t order as many books as Barnes and Noble.

BV – What happened in your career after the coloring books?

RS – Well, a friend of mine from Dial became an editor at Putnam and gave me my first manuscript to illustrate. So that was my first childrens’ trade book. And then the process began to snowball. One book led to another and another.

BV – These were flat books?

RS – Yes. Picture books.

BV – Were your illustrations similar to what you would do now?

RS – Actually I started out as a print-maker. A linoleum block printer so my original book illustrations were linoleum block prints.

BV – Were they black and white, or just a few colors?

RS – Actually some of them were pretty involved – up to fifteen blocks for one illustration.

BV – So it was very intricate.

RS – Very complicated.

BV – This is very interesting because I think that’s an element of your persona, that you have the capacity to really plan something – to really get into it.

RS – Yes. To really make it work. I really did a lot of that in printing because everything has to align. And you have to do that with pop-ups because everything has to work. That thing isn’t going to spin around by happenstance. It just doesn’t happen.

BV – But doesn’t the process involve a lot of trial and error?

RS – Oh, tons!

BV – Because I usually envision planning as being over there and trial and error being over here.

RS – That could be but often trial and error can lead to steps of progression that you wouldn’t have realized in the beginning.

RS – That’s right. Now I can be intuitive. I can mentally visualize something working.

BV – Because you’ve built up a 3D vocabulary.

RS – I love precision when I make collage papers and wet the paper and splash color on it. I love the freedom of that, but then I have to make something precise out of it. Not all of my work is like that though. Some of it is very broad.

BV – I think that the precision is intriguing to people. So – going back to the progression of your career – what happened after the linoleum prints? What came next?

RS – I started to work more in paper and discovered my love of paper which I’d always had but hadn’t had the opportunity to explore…doing paper mosaic illustrations, 2-D cut paper things which led in a natural progression to pop-ups, adding an element of dimension and of time (movement).

BV – Are you a totally self-taught paper engineer?

RS – Completely. I looked at other peoples books to figure out the hows and whys of it – and I am happy to be a part of that. You do variations on a theme by so-and-so and they do the same.

BV – I saw an exhibition a few years ago that showed how the Impressionists borrowed from each other. So it’s nothing new. Someone would start a theme and someone else would pick it up and do a variation on it.

RS – Yes. In the last year I’ve noticed some of my mechanisms appearing in the books of others. So it’s come full circle. It’s an interesting feeling. They are doing what I did.

BV – When you made your first pop-up book was it very intentional that you wanted to do a pop-up?

RS – Well it was in 1994 and it was Christmas Alphabet.

BV – Christmas Alphabet? That was your first pop-up book? You must be kidding!

RS – Orchard Books. I think it’s a division of Grolier.

BV – So tell me the story of Christmas Alphabet.

RS – I knew I wanted to do a Christmas book. Being from Michigan the winters there are so white and beautiful. Everyone said if you want to do a Christmas book it will really have to be unusual because there are so many of them each year. At that time I was working on a package design. I was doing a lot of things at the time – for products – just to pay the bills – and I was looking through a catalog and I saw a picture of a very graphic white dove against a very bright background. And I thought, “I love that! Wouldn’t it be great if I could do a Christmas book like that, very shapey and simple.” Up until that time everything that I had done had been very illustrative and involved looking. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go in a totally different direction with this book.” I wanted to make a pop-up book. But I didn’t know how, so I had to go out and teach myself the basics. What a huge undertaking. Why did I have to pick a project where I’d be making twenty-six pop-ups? It was an artistic challenge and I love challenges. Even if I fail I’d rather give myself the challenge and say I failed. Sometimes it is exhausting, but I’d be bored if I didn’t have artistic challenges in my life. I originally took it to Dial Books for Young Readers, and they just didn’t feel they could handle it. So I took it to a packager, “White Heat”, and they sold it to Orchard Books. Because I didn’t have any production understanding about what I’d have to do to make this happen, and they did.

BV – If you take something to a packager do you get a much lower percentage remuneration?

RS – Yes. Less than one half what you’d get if you went to a publisher. Christmas Alphabet is still out there. It was a learning experience, a stepping stone to other experiences, and that’s what life is.

BV – Did you give White Heat a full dummy?

RS – I gave White Heat a partial dummy. I think it was only eight pop-ups.

BV – And so it was taken on that basis?

RS – It was. They loved it and said “We’ll find someone to do this.”

BV – What was the timing on all of this?

RS – Dial got it in 1992 and had it for a year before they said, “No.” It came out in 1994, one year after I gave it to White Heat.

BV – Do you think authors should have a moratorium on how long a dummy stays with a publisher before a decision is made?

RS – I think a publisher should give a definite yes or no within six months as a courtesy, including pricing and so forth. I also believe multiple submissions are all right as long as the publisher knows from the beginning you’re making multiple submissions.

BV – How many spreads?

RS – At least three spreads, on in color.

BV – Can the publisher figure out manufacturing costs on the basis of just a few spreads?

RS – I think a good manufacturer should be able to.

BV – So once Christmas Alphabet came out, it’s like “the rest is history.”

RS – Like a wave.

BV – But you love it. Don’t you?

RS – I love being my own boss, but I don’t like the deadlines and having to live up to one’s own reputation in terms of sales and so on. The expectations of others can be stressful.

BV – How did you know Cookie Count would sell?

RS – I knew it wouldn’t be the kind of financial reward that a holiday book would – that has that built in, so I had to be willing to live with that, and the publisher did too. Also, I have to be able to do the kind of books I want to do.

BV – Right. So there’s still that tension that has to be resolved.

RS – Yes. Because publishers would like nothing better than to have me do a Christmas book every year but I don’t feel I can do that – or want to do that.

                          Part 2 of this interview will be published next month
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