CHAPEL HILL - Turn one page and you find a map of France overlaid with a sheet of clear acetate, on which you can mark the route for this year's race. Turn another and you come upon a bicyclist hunched over his handlebars; pull a tab and he not only moves from left to right, his rear wheel spinning, but a clock also ticks off his time as he goes. Open yet another page and a craggy mountain massif raises its peak up off the page, towering over the cyclists on the road below.

Chapel Hill author and illustrator Pamela Pease has just released her latest pop-up book, "Pop-Up Tour de France: The World's Greatest Bike Race." The book features a host of Pease's ingenious movable parts: a van door that opens to reveal the members of a race team inside, a pop-up of a long string of racers wending their way up off the page, a three-dimensional Eiffel Tower.

"I've always been fascinated with the Tour de France," said Pease, who runs her company, Paintbox Press, out of her Chapel Hill home. "I've always wanted to know more about it, so after I finished my last book and started looking at my laundry list of possible projects, this was up at the top."

"Tour de France" is Peace's fourth popup book. She did her first, "The Garden is Open," in 1999 as a graduate school project, and followed that with books about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and the Kentucky Derby.

She designs, writes and illustrates the books, planning and cutting out the movable parts in her second-floor studio.

"I think the biggest challenge with this one was the specificity of the event; with the mechanics of bicycles and the complicated structure of the race, it's much more technical than the other things I've done books on," she said. "My style of illustration is more free than that. So I had to find ways to combine that information with my kind of work."

She went to the Tour de France in 2007, visited several of the small towns the race passed through and took notes and made sketches. Tour officials embraced her idea and gave her information and behind-the-scenes access.

"I had to think about what was the best way to illustrate the Tour," she said. "What tells the story best? I decided to focus on the different types of stages: flat, time trial and mountain. Each one has its own strategy and equipment, so that let me get a lot of different things in the book."

The book manages to combine clever and colorful illustrations with a great deal of information, including a list of all Tour winners, explanations about how the various stages work, and tidbits of trivia: did you know, for example, that on Bastille Day, July 14, it is customary to allow a French rider to win the day's stage, as long as it doesn't affect the overall outcome of the race?

"Every book is its own project," Pease said. "I learn so much with every one."

Pease began her popup book career when she was earning her master's degree in book design and illustration from Syracuse University. Assigned to produce a 32-page picture book, she came up with "The Garden is Open," about the garden grown and opened to the public every spring by two sisters, Bernice Wade and Barbara Styles, in her Gimghoul Road neighborhood. She included a single simple pop-up in the middle of the book.

But that got her hooked. Her next book, about the Macy's parade, was full of intricate, complex moveable parts -- mostly created, she said, through a long process of trial and error. That book, in 2002, won an award as one of the top 10 independently published books of the year. She followed that with the Derby book and now the Tour one.

Just in time, too. The 96th Tour de France begins in Monaco on Saturday, and Pease will be there; she'll be flying in Friday. So will her book; it's an officially licensed product of the Tour, and copies will be available at various stops along the Tour's route.

"It's been a wonderful project," she said. "I love being able to see a project through from start to finish. There's a lot of satisfaction in that."

dave.hart@newsobserver.com, (919) 932-8744.