Fear This!

Say “phobia” to Gary Greenberg, and the first thing to pop into his mind is aerophobia--the fear of flying. It’s “my biggest,” said Greenberg, who pointed out that the airline industry actually feeds on this fear: “They use words like terminal, final boarding, departure lounge. . . .”

No surprise, then, that you’ll find aerophobia in “The Pop-up Book of Phobias.” It’s right up there with such other trepidations as fear of public speaking and fear of spiders.

Greenberg and artist Balvis Rubess sifted through phobias aplenty before settling on 10 for their tome (Rob Weisbach Books/William Morrow, $24.95). The criteria: Fears had to be common and had to work in a pop-up format.

In other words, Greenberg asked himself, “could you get the experience of the phobia from opening the book?”

Some that didn’t make the cut include agoraphobia (fear of public places) and achluophobia (fear of the dark)--”a very boring pop-up.”

Scouring an encyclopedia of phobias, fears and anxieties, he eliminated phobias that could be considered esoteric, such as “fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth” (arachibutyrophobia), fear of chickens (alektorophobia), fear of garlic (alliumphobia) and fear of relatives (syngenesophobia).

One that did make the cut is coulrophobia--”overwhelming fear of clowns, the origin of which can usually be traced to negative circus experiences in early childhood.”

For Greenberg, this one too hits close to home.

As a child, he confided, those chaps with the orange wigs and bulbous red noses terrified him--”Your parents tell you to keep away from strangers, then at every kid’s birthday party they lock you up with a clown.”

Today, he added, his feeling about clowns has “transferred from fear to annoyance.”

It was another of his childhood phobias that inspired this project. “When I was a little kid, my parents got me a pop-up book that had ghosts and goblins and strange creatures,” he said. “It really freaked me out. My parents tell me I actually became afraid of books.” (Bibliophobia.)

As a stand-up comedian, Greenberg is no stranger to one book entry, glossophobia--that’s a “marked and persistent fear of speaking in public.” A New Yorker who was playing the Gotham Comedy Club the night we spoke by telephone, he knows full well the feeling of being greeted by “people staring at me completely stone-faced.”

Rubess, whose illustrations literally jump off the pages thanks to paper sculptor Matthew Reinhart, has done work for McDonald’s, Coke and Pepsi and--we’re told in the book--lives in Toronto and “has recently entered counseling for phobophobia.”

There are evil-looking snakes sure to resonate with ophidiophobics, an eight-legged spider to freak out arachnophobics and, for those with acrophobia, a pop-up skyscraper.

Claustrophobics should get a giggle out of the section devoted to them--it’s a double page that doesn’t open all the way. Other phobias included are mysophobia, “a pathological fear of exposure to unsanitary or disease-producing substances,” and necrophobia, illustrated with a pop-up view of mourners tossing dirt over the deceased--from the deceased’s perspective.

Greenberg, who has also co-written “Self-Helpless: The Greatest Self-Help Books You’ll Never Read” (among these: “Attention Deficit Disorder: Help Is), thinks of “The Pop-up Book of Phobias” as “the perfect revenge gift.”

Or, he added, the book might be considered “exposure therapy,” one of the psychological techniques used to combat phobias.

“You might be cured of your fear,” he said, “and maybe your HMO would cover it.”