Friday 11 January 2019

ReadItDaddy's First Book of the Week - Week Ending 11th January 2019: "The Human Body: A Pop-Up Guide to Anatomy" by Richard Walker and Rachel Caldwell (Templar Publishing)

Our first Picture Book of the Week this week is a serious "WOW!" book, and a thoroughly absorbing guide to what's under your skin...
Imagine being a Victorian medical student, charged with finding out more about the human body.

Back then the only option was to find yourself a fresh cadaver (by legal means, naturally, none of that Burke and Hare nonsense!) and start peeling back the skin to see what lay underneath.

Thankfully this is 2019 and we don't have to resort to such methods to learn a lot more about our fascinating bodies.

In "The Human Body: A Pop-Up Guide to Anatomy" by Richard Walker and Rachel Caldwell, you can do the same from the comfort of your own armchair with some of the most astonishing paper engineering we've seen in a body book.

Each illustration takes its cues from classic anatomy books of the 19th century, but in full colour - with layer after layer of rather gruesome but endlessly fascinating anatomy to find out more about, starting with the head!


Before and After! Time to reveal what you look like beneath your skin and skull! Pretty!
Each page delicately reveals layer after layer of detail, and descriptive text to explain what you're looking at - and how it all works.

What lies beneath!!
From the head the book moves down to the chest, again fully revealing your muscles, skeleton and vital organs tucked inside. It's absolutely astonishingly detailed, and so utterly clever we couldn't fail to fall completely in love with it.

It's very delicate though, so be careful when unlocking the various bits to lift up. Definitely more suitable for older kids but thoroughly fascinating and extremely cleverly done.

Well done Richard and Rachel!

Sum up this book in a sentence: A truly fascinating glimpse under our skin in a book that cleverly uses fantastic presentation and illustration along with top quality paper engineering to really bring its subject to life.

"The Human Body: A Pop-Up Guide to Anatomy" by Richard Walker and Rachel Caldwell is out now, published by Templar Publishing (kindly supplied for review)