Inventions: Pop-up models from the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

This spectacular pop-up book does full justice to the genius of Leonardo. Everything about the book, its design and physicality, recreates the aesthetic of the renaissance and in particular the notebooks of the great man himself, crawling with curiosity and invention. Leonardo’s ideas about flight, battle machinery, anatomy, architecture and robotics are brought to life through ingenious paper engineering, utilising string, pullies and multifarious working parts all set against a sepia pen and ink background evoking the passage of centuries. The highly complex pop-up mechanisms leap into action from a backdrop of reproductions of the original working drawings alongside a text in the form of a version of Leonardo’s written musings and hypotheses. All of this is grandly packaged in a robust hardback cover with a magnetic clip but the complexity and delicacy of the working parts mean that the book will not survive rough handling.