Ellen G. K. Rubin is a pop-up and movable book collector known as the "Popuplady". She is best known for her collection of over 12,000 books, including more than 1,000 by the Czech paper engineer VojtÃÂch Kubaà ¡ta, as well as for her lectures and research on the history of the pop-up and movable book formats.
Rubin grew up in the Bronx, New York, and attended the Bronx High School of Science, The City College of New York, and Yale Medical School's Physician Associate Program.
In the early 1980s, Rubin purchased two Random House pop-up books for her sons, and her fascination with the format led to a lifelong pursuit of pop-up and movable books. While attending the Yale School of Medicine in the 1980s to become a Physician Associate, a friend introduced her to book collecting, and after a visit to the 1988 exhibit "Eccentric Books" at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, which featured an original copy of Petrus Apianus's Astronomicum Caesareum, Rubin's enthusiasm for pop-ups grew.
At first, Rubin's acquisitions focused on pop-up books related to children's classics and science and medicine, but quickly expanded to include any and all examples of clever pop-up mechanisms. By 2000, she had acquired around 4,000 books. As of 2018, her collection had grown to more than 9,000 books, along with thousands of pieces of pop-up and movable paper ephemera. Her collection encompasses at least 41 languages, including sign language, Icelandic, and braille, and many different materials, including a pop-up card made of elephant dung paper by book artist Edward H. Hutchins. The oldest book in her collection is a copy of [Regiomontanus]'s astronomy textbook, Kalendarium, from 1482.
Rubin's collection focuses especially on Czech pop-up book artist VojtÃÂch Kubaà ¡ta. In 2014, she told The New York Times that after encountering his book, Moko and Koko in the Jungle, she decided she "decided that I would collect everything he ever did." She became acquainted with Kubaà ¡ta's daughter, Dagmar Kubaà ¡tová Vrkljan, and contributed to a retrospective exhibition for his work in 2004. She has continued to collect and exhibit Kubaà ¡ta's work, including a 2014 exhibit at The Grolier Club in New York City and a 2015 exhibit at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Popuplady also staged another exhibit at the Grolier Club in 2022 entitled, Animated Advertising: 200 Years of Premiums, Promos, and Pop-ups. Ms. Rubin appeared on the TV program New York 1
Her library is visited by researchers around the world for the study of pop-up books, volvelles, flip-books, and other kinds of movable paper art both modern and historic. She became a charter member of the Movable Book Society in 1994, and shortly thereafter began writing articles about her collecting for the Society's newsletter, Movable Stationary.
Rubin runs a website, The Popuplady, that Rare Book Monthly called "[p]erhaps the most lively and useful of all the sites devoted to the subject".