Magical Interactive Books with Removable Artifacts - Introduction

APOCHARTA BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artefact-tastic! Interactive Books with Pull-Out Papers

Other pages in this guide: Introduction for Collectors (this page) | Removable Letters & Cards | Interactive Illustrations | Non-Fiction Facsimiles, Memorabilia & Ephemera | Puzzles, Mysteries & Clues

Collecting » Paper Engineering » Apocharta Books

On this page: Introduction | History | What do you call these books?

Introduction

Children have always had the fun stuff — pop-up dragons, fairy tales and furry farm animals. But fear not adult readers, the literary gods have sldo bestowed upon us a special type of book filled with treasures that make our shelves shimmer with a sprinkle of magic and mystery…

Welcome to my collector's guide to a very special genre of magical interactive books that I dearly love and have been collecting for many years – books with removable artefacts and other ephemera! I'm talking about special elements like:

removable letters in books, often for children (like the Jolly Postman series), or epistolary novels and art books (my own love affair with the genre started with the ground-breaking artsy love letters in the Griffin and Sabine series), and pull out paper props that form part of an experimental story line (like J.J. Abram's clever immersive treasure hunt-style S and its Book of Theseus) – for more of these see the removable letters & cards section;
interactive elements and illustrations you can play with (as in MinaLima's gorgeous interactive illustrated classics series and the Ologies series) – these are listed in the interactive illustrations section;
removable memorabilia and facsimiles (e.g. tickets and notes that are popular in tv and movie scrapbooks like the Disney and Harry Potter series, or the Museum in a Book series which reproduces historical documents and maps) – see the memorabilia & ephemera section;
removable clues you need to solve puzzles (like those used in the Interactive Mystery series) – see the puzzles, mysteries & clues section;
and a bunch of other clever paper engineering tricks, like books hidden inside books, books that vanish as you read them, and more (coming soon).

History

While movable books have long been a staple for collectors – pop-up books, lift-the-flap books, touch and feel books, etc (I have a separate guide especially for collecting pop-up books, and the Movable Book Society is a great place to learn more about the history of these books in general) – the inclusion of removable artefacts in adult novels and non-fiction works is still relatively recent. Its roots parallel the “found footage” film trend popular in the 1990s, where the story unfolds as if discovered in real life, creating an immersive, almost voyeuristic experience.

Many people's first experience with this style of publication is often in childhood with The Jolly Postman. I personally first encountered it when the Griffin and Sabine series came out – I still remember standing in the bookshop with my mother, reverently turning pages with both of us completely mesmerised and vowing to save up and return so we could bring a copy of this magical tome back home with with us. (Spoiler alert, yes reader, we did!)

But what do you call them?

If you've found your way here to this here internet outpost, I can only imagine you also have more than a passing interest in these types of books. I'm hoping to find a community of us collecting this beautiful but nameless subgenre of movable books. The lack of a name to describe them is one reason I think it is so hard to track these types of books down, so I'm also interested in what you call them. I've seen them variously called ‘interactive books', ‘technotexts', books with ‘pull-out letters' or ‘removable ephemera/facsimiles'. Personally, I call them my “apocharta” (ah-po-KAR-tah) books. It's from the Greek apo (“away”) and the Latin charta (“paper”), which literally means paper that is set loose from the book. My plan is for us all to start using a common term to categorise our own removable emphemera book collections, and then we are going to make them so much easier for everyone to find. Right? Right….

So, my fellow apocharta peeps, where you at?? If these books interest you too, please do give us all a holler in the comments – I'd love for you to share your favourite titles, or let me know of anything I've missed in my guides. Or even just to let me know there's more than just me, hiding out there in the web, fondling our book collections…

As I started to put together this guide I realised my list of apocharta books is quite long (literally in the hundreds – which you'll either be thrilled to know if you collect them, or horrified if you wandered over here by mistake), so I've broken the pages up loosely into subcategory pages to give me space to add short overviews and photos for the titles as the quality and level of interactivity varies. However, some books do fall under more than one heading, so it's worth browsing through them all.

Removable paper hugs to all you fellow collectors, and I hope you find some new books to love in these lists!

Daisy x