Warhol's Pop-Up Book Is Back, Nose Job and Balloon Included
A book that hands you a new nose, plays a tune and floats a silver balloon is back in print after almost 60 years.
Phaidon, the London-based publisher, and Melcher Media, the New York-based book producer, rebuilt Andy Warhol's Index (Book) page for page with the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York. The new edition was published in 2026, after the original sold out its print run in 1967, according to reporting by Artnet News.
It sold out for a reason. The first Index was not a normal picture book. It held pop-ups, stickers and moisture-sensitive tabs that change colour with a damp finger, plus a silver balloon, a paper accordion that makes sound, a thin plastic flexi-disk fixed to a wire spring, and a fold-out rainbow nose for a "Do-It-Yourself Nose Job." The publishers added "(Book)" to the title because the object was so unlike a conventional book.
The Smithsonian Libraries in Washington gives a sense of how strange the original felt. Its copy has a reflective, hologram front cover. Phaidon, on its product page, calls the title one of the most important photo books of the twentieth century.
Rebuilding it took more than five years. The team worked from two surviving copies of the 1967 edition, taking them apart and scanning the pages to make mechanicals, the exact layouts printers work from. They also cleared rights for photographs by Billy Name, Stephen Shore and Nat Finkelstein.
Some parts needed detective work. The pop-ups were remade on sturdier paper to survive handling. The team tracked down the one company in the United States still making flexi-disks, those bendable records that play on a turntable.
The result mirrors the 1967 edition in size, content and all ten tactile elements, those touch-and-play parts. Only the paper stock was subtly upgraded. It is a hardcover with 48 pages, listed at US$69.95 on Phaidon's US store with ISBN 9781837293414, according to Phaidon. The new edition also carries an essay by Charles Melcher, the founder of Melcher Media, on how the remake was done.
What makes this stand out for fans is the chance to handle it. The nose is still there. The balloon still floats. You do not read this one sitting still.
