SOLOMON GRUNDY Retold and illustrated by Nick Bantock New York, Viking Penguin, 1992. unpaged, laminated board, $11.95, ISBN 0-670-84319-9. Distributed by Penguin Books Canada. CIP Pre-school to Grade 7/Ages 3 to 12 Reviewed by J.E. Simpson Volume 20 Number 4 1992 September Pop-up books possess an almost primal appeal. They are, for a start, genuinely engaging; the delight of their machinery transcends anything as banal as reading. They are nearly always witty. They are unfailingly ingenious (they have to be, as anyone who has ever tried paper-folding knows. Imagine folding paper to withstand the demands of machine reproduction!) Over the last few years, Nick Bantock has cut and folded a small-format niche for himself in pop-up country. First was There Was an Old Lady (Viking Penguin, 1990), then Jabberwocky? Now he has adapted the text o that rather grim nursery rhyme, "Solomon Grundy," and illuminated it with the aid of Dennis Meyer in pop-ups that the jacket rather grandly calls "paper engineering." The result is as charming as Solomon Grundy is ever likely to be. It contains some delicious surprises — a pig for a wife, a thermometer that rises as he opens his mouth, a smiling sun that sticks its tongue out at the end — but, given the sparseness i the original material, Solomon Grundy doesn't offer nearly the enchantment of Bantock's previous titles. J.E. Simpson is a former supervisor of art j the Edmonton public school system in Edmonton, Alberta.