A conversation with the founder of Les Rêveurs, the small French publishing house that has spent nine years turning the Persian national epic into hand-built paper engineering — with a third and final volume launching this October.
In the spring of 2016, Nicolas Lebedel was flipping through a foreign-rights catalogue from Fantagraphics — the American publisher he already knew through Krazy Kat, George Herriman’s landmark comic strip, which his own house, Les Rêveurs, had brought into French — when a pop-up book stopped him: Zahhak, adapted from the Shâhnâmeh, the eleventh-century Persian epic by Ferdowsi. He acquired the French rights on the strength of the images alone, and a few months later met the book’s creator, artist Hamid Rahmanian, on the very day he landed in New York.
Nine years, one bankrupt printer, and two further pop-up books later, that meeting has grown into a small trilogy. Zahhak: La Légende du Roi Serpent (2017) and Les Sept Épreuves de Rostam (2022) both sold out their French print runs; a third and, Lebedel suspects, final volume — simply titled Shâhnâmeh: Pop-up — is set for release in French bookstores on October 22, 2026, gathering eight tales from across the epic into sixteen pages of hand-assembled paper mechanisms. Les Rêveurs is currently pre-selling the book through a crowdfunding campaign on Ulule, open until August 31, 2026.
Honargardi spoke with Lebedel by email about how a Paris-area publisher with “no editorial line” ended up as one of the more unlikely custodians of Ferdowsi’s epic in France — and what it costs, in time, money, and printer relationships, to keep doing it.
You discovered Hamid Rahmanian’s work in Fantagraphics’ foreign-rights catalogue while you were in New York for the Krazy Kat deal, and met him the same day you arrived, in 2016. What convinced you — on a first meeting — that a small French publisher should take on a 600-page Persian epic?
We knew the American publisher Fantagraphics because we had bought from them the rights to the American edition of Krazy Kat, George Herriman’s comic strip, in order to produce a French-language edition.
And one day, while receiving their catalogue of foreign rights sales, we came across the Zahhak pop-up, whose rights were available for France. The pop-up looked so incredible that we went ahead and acquired the rights. It was spring 2016, and indeed, during a personal trip that summer, I suggested meeting Hamid Rahmanian the very day my family and I arrived in Queens. I saw him arrive in a torrential downpour with his magnificent illustrated Shâhnâmeh and a first version of Zahhak as a pop-up. It was a wonderful meeting — Hamid is passionate about his art, and his energy is contagious.
That first meeting focused mostly on the Zahhak pop-up. I hadn’t yet suggested to Hamid that we publish a French edition of the full Shâhnâmeh itself — a 600-page volume was far too ambitious for our house at the time. But it was a delight to listen to him talk about that text, and about Persian pictorial art more broadly.
The first French print run of Zahhak sold out almost immediately, and then your Singapore printer went bankrupt before you could reprint. How close did that come to ending the project, before Sirivatana in Thailand took over?
I believe we were very lucky that Simon Arizpe, the paper engineer who collaborates with Hamid on all his pop-up books, knew other printers in Asia through his experience with other American pop-up projects. Simon recommended Sirivatana, and it turned out to be an excellent choice — a lovely team who work extremely well, paying great attention to every project they handle and to supporting the publisher.
The Seven Trials of Rostam ships in three languages plus Persian script, and each copy takes three to three and a half hours to hand-assemble from roughly two hundred die-cut pieces. At what point do you know the economics of a book like that will actually work?
If we applied the margin standards that major publishing houses require for this kind of demanding illustrated book — full of cut-outs and intricate mechanisms — it simply wouldn’t be viable.
Les Rêveurs is a very small publishing house run by two volunteers. We operate without staff, and therefore with minimal running costs. That’s what lets us take on extraordinary, somewhat crazy editorial projects like Hamid Rahmanian and Simon Arizpe’s pop-up books. What drives us is passion — and in this particular case, the desire to introduce Persian culture to readers who weren’t necessarily familiar with the Shâhnâmeh.
This new volume, launching October 22, 2026, effectively completes a trilogy from the Shâhnâmeh — and your Ulule campaign for it closes August 31. Is pre-selling before printing simply how Les Rêveurs has to make books this labor-intensive, or is it also a way of testing whether the French audience for Persian mythology has grown since 2017?
We’d already run a fundraising campaign for Les Sept Épreuves de Rostam in 2022, so this isn’t new for us. A Ulule campaign makes the editorial project known six months before release, first to a circle of insiders, then gradually to a wider audience as it progresses. For Shâhnâmeh, whose campaign ends August 31, we need people to pre-order their copy — and they’ll receive a very nice gift in return. It also lets us collect funds in advance to pay the printer, because the cost of this project is, frankly, pharaonic in dollars.
The ultimate goal is to have the new Shâhnâmeh pop-up in bookstores for its release on October 22, 2026 — and a crowdfunding pre-order is also a way of building interest among booksellers who may go on to recommend the book to their own customers for the end-of-year season.
The French readers who have followed us faithfully since 2017, when Zahhak first came out, may still be amazed by Shâhnâmeh Pop-up — the pages Hamid and Simon have created are incredible. And Iranians living in France have already shown their support by pre-ordering through the campaign, though there’s a good chance many will also buy it in bookstores, since this book matters to them.
Les Rêveurs has no fixed editorial line — Krazy Kat, Jacovitti, Baru, and now a Persian court epic. What actually connects those choices for you?
You’re entirely right, we don’t have an editorial line. What drives us is passion for a work, the richness of an encounter with an author, and the desire to pass on forgotten stories or little-known comics to new generations of readers — or, on the contrary, to help launch new authors. In the three examples you mention, the reasons are all different. Krazy Kat was a dream — publishing a strip so fundamental to the history of comics. Baru is a French author who has fascinated us for a long time, and he’s a lovely person. Jacovitti’s Pinocchio had never crossed the Alps, and it felt important to introduce French readers to his pre-1960s drawing style — a popular work that had, moreover, been censored by the fascist government in wartime Italy.
I would like to mention that this publishing adventure exists thanks to Manu Larcenet, a comic book author with whom I created Les Rêveurs in 1997. Manu draws a book for Les Rêveurs almost every two years, and he waives his royalties on all his sales. It is thanks to him that we can embark on incredible projects like the edition of a pop-up book as complex as Shâhnâmeh.
Ten thousand English copies of Zahhak sold in the US, yet the American publisher chose not to reprint it — while you went on to a second, then a third book. What does that gap tell you about how Persian classical literature is valued by publishers versus readers on each side of the Atlantic?
It’s true — we reprinted Zahhak twice, for a total of 7,500 copies across three editions. Given the difference in population between the US and France, that’s not insignificant.
I think this comes down to two things. First, the French public loves pop-up books. Walk into our bookstores and you’ll find a wide selection of them, from simple designs to far more sophisticated ones like Hamid’s. Readers were genuinely astonished by the complexity of the pages and the detail packed into them. Second, it’s rare to find books that present or even evoke the Shâhnâmeh at all, so these first two pop-ups helped introduce a text that matters enormously to Iranians, and stirred French readers’ curiosity about that part of Persian culture.
Ferdowsi wrote the Shâhnâmeh partly to keep the Persian language alive under Arab conquest a thousand years ago. After three books together, is there a fourth one already taking shape — or has the trilogy said what you and Hamid set out to say?
At first glance, Hamid has finished making pop-up books from the Shâhnâmeh — it’s a long, demanding process that asks a great deal of both him and Simon Arizpe. But you never know.
If Shâhnâmeh is the last pop-up in the series, it’s a beautiful way to close this chapter. Unlike the first two books, this one doesn’t focus on a single character — it presents a succession of stories about the great figures who punctuate the epic.
Hamid has plenty of other projects underway — a new stage show, an animated film. Persian culture will keep being passed on to new generations, one way or another.
Shâhnâmeh: Pop-up is available for pre-order now through Les Rêveurs’ Ulule campaign, which closes August 31, 2026, ahead of the book’s release in French bookstores on October 22, 2026. Readers can also find Zahhak: La Légende du Roi Serpent and Les Sept Épreuves de Rostam through Les Rêveurs, and the English editions of all three books, including advance orders for the new volume, through Hamid Rahmanian’s Kingorama.
Discover more of Hamid Rahmanian’s work: For the full range of his Shâhnâmeh projects — illustrated books, audiobooks, pop-up editions, and theatrical productions — visit Kingorama.com.
Photos courtesy of Nicolas Lebedel and Les Rêveurs.