By Marion Bataille
The alphabet with no story attached: 26 letters engineered out of folded paper, each one rising, sliding, or turning into the next, in stark black, white, and red.
There's no story here at all. It's the alphabet, but every letter is a piece of paper engineering. The A rises into a peak, the M folds over into a W, and other letters revolve or slide or stand straight up as you turn the page. The cover is lenticular, so it shifts and shimmers when you tilt it in your hands. Everything is stark and modern: black, white, and one bold red. It reads less like a book than like an object you operate.
This is the gift for a family who'd set it on the coffee table as readily as the nursery shelf. It's an alphabet, so a preschooler learning letters may get a real thrill from it, but the real pleasure is the engineering, watching a flat page become a standing letter, and that reaches the four-to-eight crowd and the grown-ups right along with them. It's far more delicate than a sturdy board-book pop-up, so it suits a child who's past the grabbing-and-yanking stage, or one working through it on your lap. It's as much a small sculpture as a book, and I'd hand it over with that in mind.