When is a book not a book? When it’s a pop-up, it seems. Pop-ups have become a publishing phenomenon, ever more complex, many revealing technological wonders and baroque stage settings constructed by “paper engineers”.

They are also popular. Since the appearance in the late Seventies of Jan Pie+nkowski’s Haunted House and Robert Crowther’s Most Amazing Hide-and-Seek Alphabet, now classics, publishers have depended on pop-ups to breathe financial life into a struggling hardback market. People are willing to part with Pounds 12.99 the regular price for an all-singing, all-dancing product.

They have evolved into precious, fragile toys that may make collectors’ items, but lack the durability of a simple book whose well-thumbed pages can seem like old friends. Well-thumbed pop-ups tend to look rather sad, tattered and torn.

Pop-ups depend on cheap intensive labour. The vast majority are printed and assembled by thousands of women on production lines in Colombia, or Singapore. They do the folding, insert tabs into slits, connect pivots and make the all-important glue points. Only the covers are machine-made. It’s a sobering thought. But the end result can be spectacular. At best they can be inventive and ingenious, adding to a story. Once intended to make books for the very young more fun and interactive, they are now designed for older children who also enjoy the involvement they can offer.

Robert Crowther is a master at creating durable, enticing and witty pop-ups and The Most Amazing Night Book (Viking Pounds 9.99) is no exception. Crowther who, unusually for this genre, is creator of text, illustration and technology, captures the wonder and spectacular variety of life at night as seen from an aeroplane. Looking down on a welter of human activity, lit up in the darkness, we follow a train’s journey from the city’s central station to the airport, into the countryside and on to the coast. The alienation as well as the magic of night-time is captured in the illustration, which is enhanced by the huge numbers of flaps to lift, tabs to pull and wheels to turn. We can reveal dancers in a nightclub and move ghosts through a castle, a Boeing through the sky, lorries along a motorway and a tractor lit up for night-time ploughing over a hill. This evocative work is enlivened and unified by the many witty and enticing speech bubbles which have become Crowther’s trademark.

The Creation by Brian Wildsmith (Oxford University Press Pounds 12.99) matches delicious illustrations and beautifully designed, awe-inspiring pop-ups to text based on the Book of Genesis. Combining rich passages with fine, detailed drawing and bold, effective constructions, Wildsmith captures the wonder and poetry of the creation story in a book that families will treasure.

Nick Sharratt’s Rocket Countdown (Walker Books Pounds 7.99) is a simple, effective, inventive and boldly-designed lift-the-flap book for the under-fives. The pictures are bright, clear, wonderfully composed and very funny. Unlike many pop-ups for this age group, this one will undoubtedly last the course.

Dinner With Fox (Tango Books Pounds 8.99) by Stephen Wyllie, illustrated by Korky Paul, is an enduring three-dimensional picture book first published in 1990. In this moral tale, full of the sharpest, blackest humour, pop-ups are used to produce plunging perspective and expressive movement. Every word is chosen with care, every pop-up adds to the drama.

Some pop-ups are more like games than books. Iain Smith’s The Eye of the Pharaoh (Orchard Books Pounds 12.99), is an inventive whodunit with letters to open and clues to search for. Robust but absorbing, this is a neat way of playing detective in an exotic setting.

Maisy’s House by Lucy Cousins (Walker Books Pounds 12.99) is an ingenious cardboard home, with rooms swinging out with the turn of every page. As in all Maisy books the colours are rich, the drawing bold, generous and witty. A cut-out Maisy can be dressed in cut-out clothes, and these are probably robust enough to give hours of pleasure.

Pop-ups are being used increasingly in non-fiction books and, if well-designed, can aid understanding through three-dimensional exploration. Knights by John Howe (Tango Books Pounds 12.99) makes an impressive initial impact, but the pop-ups render the text difficult to read and detract from the history rather than enhancing it. The opening display, in which you can peel back the armour to reveal the man beneath, is effective, but the pop-up drama which follows is clumsy and tends to spoil some impressive illustration.

Action Robots (Tango Books Pounds 11.99) by Tim Reeve and Gavin MacLeod employs sophisticated three-dimensional engineering to show the use of robots in surgery; in space; in industry; on the ocean bed; in nuclear power stations. Some of the pop-ups are more successful than others, but they clearly demonstrate the sheer ingenuity of some of these machines.