Craft Around the Country

How Do You Flip Through the World's Largest Pop-Up Book?

Luceros y Penumbras, nestled into a library rotunda in downtown Los Angeles, requires a substantial team—and a lot of care—to turn each page.

By Jacqueline Huynh Young
October 2, 2026

Digital Only

Paper

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Artist Daniel González with a linocut rendering of Los Angeles Central Library, a piece of his work Luceros y Penumbras, the world’s largest pop-up book.

It takes ten people to turn a page of the world’s largest pop-up book. Someone counts to three, and everyone moves at once. Four people hold long dowels tipped with soft pads: two push the enormous page upward, while the other two wait to catch it on the other side. The other six lift from the edges, then run around to help ease the page down. For a few moments, the ten move in a kind of choreography, their steps echoing through the rotunda of the Richard J. Riordan Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

Weighing in at 1,800 pounds, Luceros y Penumbras, which loosely translates to “starlight and shadows,” is a behemoth of paper and engineering. “There is no mechanical way to move this,” says Beth Goodnight of Goodnight and Co., the team of set builders who constructed the book. “It takes ten people to turn that page, okay? Not nine. You can’t turn it with nine.”

The brainchild of curator Todd Lerew, Luceros y Penumbras was commissioned by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles (LFLA) in partnership with the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) for the Richard J. Riordan Central Library’s centennial. Officially recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest pop-up book, it measures 31 feet by 20 feet when opened, and has pop-up elements rising over 11 feet tall.

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures, courtesy of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles

Visitors look at a spread featuring the Los Angeles Central Library's south façade in Luceros y Penumbras.

The illustrations, a model of the library itself on one page and a tree of wisdom on the other, began as linocuts by printmaker Daniel González, with paper engineer Matthew Reinhart translating the designs into three-dimensional models.

The stars surrounding the pop-up library on the first page draw on the building’s guiding architectural theme, the Light of Learning. They also come from stories González’s grandmother recounted to him as a child. “She would tell me about how everybody in her community would come out when the lucero came out,” he says. “They hold very deep, special meanings to a lot of Latin American cultures. These stars are in songs, and they’re a vehicle for storytelling.”

Bringing González’s illustrations to near-life-size proved far more complicated than simply scaling up. The layers of Falconboard, yellow wood glue, and tent-weight canvas needed to build a durable pop-up book became so bulky that the pages could no longer close properly. “If you look at a pop-up, there might be 10 layers of paper in there,” Reinhart says. “But because the layers of the pop-up pieces were so thick, there was some depth. So we had to, at the last minute, make some big changes with the way it was attached to the page.”

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures, courtesy of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles

The pop-up book open to a spread featuring a tree of wisdom.

Turning Reinhart’s models into the full-scale book fell to a massive team of 45 people at Goodnight & Co. Even getting the finished structure into the library required some ingenuity. “We had to cut the whole thing up so we could put it in a truck, take it to the library, fit it through a double set of doors, and carry it up the stairs to reassemble it in place,” says Goodnight.

Its pages are now turned once a month. The previous Guinness World Records holder, by comparison, was turned only once. LFLA and LAPL plan to keep Luceros y Penumbras on view through January 17, extending its run beyond the original November end date.

Each additional page turn puts more strain on the book. “Every time we turn it, we’re shortening its lifespan, but we don’t know when that’s going to be,” Goodnight says. “That’s why it will be the same ten people turning it each time.”

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Turning the book's pages takes ten people, and every time they turn a page, the book's lifespan shortens.

Jacqueline Huynh Young is a Vietnamese American artist and writer based in Los Angeles.

Learn more about Luceros y Penumbras online.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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