The combination of imagination, adventure, foreign creatures, light spectacles, and fairy tale aspects guarantees that Star Wars will always find an audience with kids. Catering to those younger viewers, the series has provided additional entertainment in the form of books, comics, and TV shows. Some of the popular kid-focused additions to the series have been the pop-up books.

Pop-ups are three-dimensional books that combine story and color illustrations with movable pages that rise when opened. They are also known as movable books, tunnel books, pop-outs, transformations, and pull-downs. They can be likened to origami in the 3D aspects of the paper construction, though origami uses folding rather than the cut and glued card stock of pop-ups. In the case of Star Wars, children get to enjoy seeing their favorite characters, ships, and creatures physically jump out of the pages.

What’s surprising is that pop-up books have been around for over 700 years and for the majority of that time, they weren’t made for children. Initially, pop-up books were created by artists, book designers, and scientists to explore new ways to create literature and utilize its abilities for educational purposes. Often, they’d contain a revolving disc that could be used to teach astronomy, anatomy, even carry a secret code. Pop-up books weren’t made for entertainment until the late 18th century and in the 1930s they started becoming more prominent for kids.

The Star Wars pop-up books started being published after the first movie, followed by a wave of them in the early 1980s, a resurgence in the mid-1990s, and an additional few in more recent years. Covering a variety of topics, the pop-up books provided film adaptations, specific stories, and subject features. Now, they can be found for as little as a few dollars, many sit comfortably in the $20 to $40 range, and some can command even higher prices ‒ depending on condition, age, and significance.