Booked in Ibarra.

Andean craftswomen provide worker pool for pop-up books.

FOR NEARLY A QUARTER OF A CENTURY, Colombia's venerated book-publishing tradition included a lavish and expensive specialty: pop-up books. Unlike their flat-book sisters, these tomes are jammed with folds, flaps and three-dimensional illustrations that spring up when a page is turned. Colombia was the only country in the Americas that produced the pricey books.

Some pop-up books contain several hundred pieces that must be individually glued in place. That labor-intensive factor is what persuaded multinational book maker Carvajal to take its pop-up book assembly across the border in 1993 to Ibarra, on the outskirts of picturesque San Antonio de Ibarra, Ecuador. That whitewashed town and neighboring communities share a long tradition of leather work, wood carving, weaving and embroidery. For the family-owned maker of pop-up books, those craft traditions translated into a pool of nimble-fingered workers.

"The labor costs and the costs of operation were also lower in Ecuador than Colombia," explains Guillermo Holguin, manager of Carvajal's Cargraphics plant in Cali, Colombia, where the pop-up templates--like model airplane kits--are printed and cut before they are shipped south across the border for assembly in Ibarra. "The move helped us at a time when there was a threat from Asian competitors." Pop-up Nobel Prize. The move did more than that. It spawned an award-winning facility that annually churns out 10 million of the world's most detailed pop-up books. Last year, it won a prestigious Premier Print Award--known among printing houses as a Benny--from the Printing Industries of America for The Pop-up Book of Phobias.

"That's like the Nobel Prize of the printing industry" says Holguin.

The pulse point for San Antonio de Ibarra is the main plaza bursting with yellow, lilac and red flowers. Shops bordering the square sell carved wooden religious relics, sculpture and chess sets. Indigenous women from nearby Otavalo wear embroidered white blouses and multiple necklaces of gold glass beads. Their own community is famous for its brilliant blue and purple textiles.

Elderly residents sit outside their houses. "I was born here, and I'll die here," says Lisandro Yepez, 85.

For locals who share Yepez's sentiments, the nearby Cargraphics factory has provided jobs and kept hundreds of area residents from joining the exodus of Ecuadorans headed to Spain, the United States and elsewhere in search of work.

During a recent visit to the pop-up factory, the book assembly lines were busy. Some 600 workers--mostly women--cut out, smoothed, folded and pasted three-dimensional parts to stitched pages. Aside from the odd blow to a book with a rubber mallet, or a quick exchange of chitchat, the book makers worked in silence.

Some workers were putting together a whimsical version of the Wizard of Oz, complete with a gray tornado on the opening pages. A sparking yellow brick road runs through the book; readers get tinted glasses to view the Emerald City. That book just won Cargraphics two more Bennys--for "unique folds" and special innovation. The awards ceremony takes place in Chicago in September.

Another book being assembled, Fuzzy Yellow Ducklings, appeals to everyone's inner child: Touch the sticky pink line and guess which animal hides behind the flap. In this case, it's a frog's tongue. What about the scratchy blue crescent? A shark's fin.

When pop-up books first appeared on the literary scene some 800 years ago, they were geared toward adults. Modern-day adult pop-up books run the range from interiors of art museums that spring up when a page is turned to elaborate fashion collections with pop-up models. Just as important now is the children's market.

Ibarra's factory caters to both as it turns out pop-up books in more than 32 languages. Holguin says 60% of the books are destined for the United States, "Another 30% go to Europe and 10% to Asia, mostly Japan," Holguin adds.

Juan Calderon, manager at the Ibarra factory, says the demand from the U.S. market appears to be rising.

But South America's only pop-up book factory is starting to feel a new round of pressure from Asian competitors in the book-assembly arena. "The high proportion of manual work in graphic arts means a lot of rivals from Hong Kong and China," says Holguin. "The Asians have an unlimited pool of cheap workers so the competition is very fierce. They are a threat to us."

Cargraphics pays a typical monthly salary of US$104 plus benefits, counting the average $21 hike in salaries since 1997. Transport and energy price have risen about 60% in the last four years.

Just as Cargraphics rode the first wave of Asian competition nearly a decade ago by moving into Ecuador, it has held off the latest by specializing. And that specialization has fed right into the strength of Ibarra's workers: manual dexterity and attention to detail.

"We lost out to the Asians on simple pop-up books. They have taken that market away from us," Holguin says. "But we have become famous for assembling the most complex books, the ones that depend on the most intensive hand labor"