Be careful what you read! Builder ilive has created this literary LEGO pop-up model based on The Book of the Dead from The Mummy movie series. ilive was inspired to build this book for the “Like An Open Book” contest on the French forum, Brickpirate.

The goal of the contest is to build a book and then add something on top of it that relates to that book (like Malin Kylinger’s The Legend of Anendra, for example). ilive made a replica of the book from the film and crafted an Egyptian temple scene on top of it. We reached out to him for a bit more insight:

“I really like adventure movies like Indiana Jones and The Mummy, so I thought that the Book of the Dead from the Mummy could be very interesting to create in LEGO (plus, almost everyone is an enthusiast about ancient Egypt, right?). As the book is closed, I didn't have enough space to do a pyramid or something else very large, so I chose the opening of a mysterious temple. I added some detail with a statue, an obelisk, and a lot of sand!”

Some of the smaller details really caught my eye. I love how he used the Shuriken sprue on the base of the obelisk as an Egyptian scarab ornament and how he didn’t push all the tiles flat to create some texture. The locking mechanism is essentially a cheese slope mosaic creating the shape of the overlarge star-shaped key from the movie that unlocks the book to command armies of the dead.

“I really wanted to build the beautiful opening mechanism that we see on the front of the book from the movie (though it doesn’t work here!). It was the hardest part of the build, but it was also the most fun part too, ironically. On my first few first tries, I only used gold slopes and no trans-clear slopes. It looked great, but everything fell apart whenever I had to move the book (because none of the sloped were connected to anything). In the end, I was so frustrated that I used the trans-clear slopes that don’t move around as much.”

“Another fun anecdote is that the main minifig (the priest) should have been Anubis, the god of death. That minifig would have been really perfect but when I saw the price, it was too expensive. I checked my minifigs and found a gold animal Chima helmet instead. The funny part is that it is a crocodile helmet... and the crocodile is more associated with Sobek, the god of life and power. So really in my model, the priest of the Book of the Dead has a helmet of the god of life!”

I guess I’ll be reading more in the next few weeks since I’m pretty sure more awesome LEGO book builds will pop up soon. To enter the contest, you had to be a member of the Brickpirate forum before it started, though I hope it inspires others to build a large LEGO library!

What LEGO book would you like to see built for this contest? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Do you want to help BrickNerd continue publishing articles like this one? Become a patron to show your support, get early access, exclusive swag and more.