Not long after he’s started working at Bob Baker Marionette Theater in the mid-’80s, Randal J. Metz recalls Bob Baker literally dropping an assignment into his lap: The puppetry legend and Metz’s boss wanted his new employee to string a Burmese puppet of a horse and rider.

Oh, and there was more.

“He said, ‘It has to be strung authentically, you have to use the proper materials, and I need it in two days,’” Metz says. “So he left it on my lap.

“It was my first job working in the theater, and it ended up being for the opening of Eddie Murphy’s movie, ‘The Golden Child,’” Metz says of the puppet. “He tossed me in there. To help me get growing up as a puppeteer, but also to show his other puppeteers, who weren’t all professionals, what you can do.”

And the result? “I got done, and he said, ‘Great, this is exactly what I wanted.”

Metz says he hopes his new book, “Enchanted Strings: Bob Baker Marionette Theater,” which arrives in stores Feb. 8 and features a foreword by filmmaker Jordan Peele, might have the same effect on readers that Baker had on aspiring puppeteers: To inspire, inform, and ultimately, like the man and the theater at the heart of the story, entertain.

“Everything comes full circle,” says Metz, 62, who fell in love with puppetry when as a 10-year-old boy he saw a production of “Treasure Island” at the Storybook Puppet Theater at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland.

“What we forget about, we’re going to remember, and it’s going to influence us later on,” he says. “So I’m very glad the book is out there.

The book of Bob

Metz had seen Baker at puppetry conventions as far back as 1970, and then later on he’d watch Baker’s occasional visits to Children’s Fairyland, where Metz had talked its longtime director Lewis Mahlmann into letting him work while still a schoolboy.

But around the time Metz graduated from San Francisco State University in the early ’80s, he got to know Baker when both ended up doing puppet shows at the Humboldt County Fair one summer.

At the end of the fair, Baker offered Metz a job. He worked for Baker for four years in the late ’80s, while keeping his job at Children’s Fairyland, where he’s been director of Storybook Puppet Theater since 1991.

Baker died in 2014, but the Bob Baker Marionette Theater continues. A few years ago as plans for a book began to develop, Metz was contacted as a possibility to write the history of the theater, which opened in 1963.

“They started thinking about a book, and they started looking at what I had done,” says Metz, whose previous books include “A Century of California Puppetry: How the West was Strung.”

Alex Evans, executive director and head puppeteer at the Bob Baker theater, approached Metz to write the book with the idea that in addition to Baker’s life, it should tell the story of the theater and many of the unsung puppeteers and artists who’d worked with Baker.

“They asked me, ‘Can you recreate in the book, telling the history of the theater as though you’re with Bob, in the early morning hours, listening to him?’” Metz says. “So we tried really hard to do that.”

Look back at Baker

“Enchanted Strings” turns back time to 1924, when Baker was born, and then follows him and the world of puppetry in Los Angeles to the present day.

Baker was 5 when he saw his first puppet show at a furniture and housewares store. Department stores in Los Angeles often hosted puppet shows for shoppers’ children and decorated their window displays with puppets too.

When he was 8, Baker wrote Walt Disney to ask if he could “look around” his Hyperion Avenue studio. The book includes a sweet letter written by Disney’s secretary in response, as well as an entire chapter of Baker’s later work for Disney and Disneyland, which included animated Disney movie character puppets in window displays at the theme park and for many years a line of limited-editon Disney character puppets.

By 10, he had taken over a garage at his family’s Echo Park home and was producing his own puppet shows.

Any time one of the big puppetry companies such as the Yale Puppeteers came through town, Baker was there. As an adolescent, he was helping backstage in local puppet theaters, including the Teatro Torito on Olvera Street.

Scores of photographs, artist sketches, and other documents fill the pages of “Enchanted Strings,” many of them from the collection Baker gave the Los Angeles Public Library. Other material published in the book or used for research came from the theater’s archives, which, required a lot of digging to make sense of, Metz says.

Baker, Metz says, was very good at organizing his workspace, and much less so when it came to documentation.

“One of the things he taught me was to be highly organized,” he says. “I remember one of the first jobs I had there was redoing a costume on a puppet from the ’30s.

“I said, ‘How are ever going to find this material?’” Metz says. “He goes, ‘Oh, no problem.’ He went to a cabinet, opened it up, and he had a whole bolt of the original fabric. I looked around and noticed that all of the boxes were very finely labeled with what was in them.”

Paperwork, such as the press releases, show notes, design sketches, and other material, was a different story.

“We were trying to write the definitive history of Bob’s theater while trying to clean up the archives and understanding it for a brand-new group of puppeteers that never experienced Bob,” Metz says.

Puppets and pizzazz

“Enchanted Strings” also makes clear the influences that shaped Baker and his work, and the techniques he created that in turn influenced others.

“I really do believe Bob’s theater is successful because it gives children their first look at a Broadway production,” Metz says of the shows Baker and his partner Alton Wood created, many of which are part of the company’s repertory to this day.

“You’re actually giving kids their first pizzazz, their first Las Vegas revue-style show, you know, with the lights and the puppets that come up to them, the costumes,” he says. “I think that’s kind of a lost art form, so I’m glad the theater is successfully still here.”

Vaudeville puppeteers were an early influence, using marionettes, many of them with special effects built into them, but performing in the traditional style from behind the stage, Metz says.

In the ’30s, Baker’s mentors, Frank Paris and Bob Bromley, decided to step out from behind the scenes to accompany their puppets on stage.

“But they performed only on stage, and they won’t let anybody touch their puppets, or get close to them,” Metz says. “Bob said, ‘Let’s do the same thing, but let’s do it on floor level with kids sitting all around us and the families in the chairs.

“‘Furthermore, we’re going to let the kids touch the puppets,’” he says. “Not very many puppeteers let the kids touch the puppets. Bob’s big thing was if you tell a child you can’t touch the puppet it’s almost like turning them off to what they might become. But let them touch it, it’ll inspire them.

“So Bob actually brought the puppet theater into the audience,” Metz says. “I think that’s probably Bob’s greatest thing, that the Bob Baker Marionette Theater is an interactive Broadway experience for kids.”

A lasting legacy

Puppetry is a much different field today than it was in Baker’s heyday. Kids these days are focused on digital screens more than marionette strings, and stores long ago ended their puppetry shows.

Hollywood, which once employed Baker to make puppets on everything from “Bewitched” and “Star Trek” to “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” uses computer effects today.

But the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, despite some financial hard times and a move from its original home near downtown Los Angeles to its current Highland Park location, is doing well these days, Metz says.

“Live puppet theater can be found at Bob’s, can be found at Fairyland, and there’s another puppet theater at Happy Hollow in San Jose which does a nice job,” he says. “But not many permanent puppet theaters much anymore.

“Most puppeteers are now are taking their shows to the libraries or to birthday parties, to make an income,” Metz says.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, which still uses many puppets made decades ago by Baker and his team of artisans, has done an excellent job making connections with the community, which in turn continues to support its work.

“It’s just amazing,” Metz says of the theater that is Baker’s legacy. “So kudos to Bob for leaving them with all of this stuff, but kudos to the talented theater people who are going to carry this legacy into the future.”

‘Enchanted Strings’ events

Feb. 12: Virtual event at 1 p.m. with author Randal J. Metz and Alex Evans, head puppeteer at Bob Baker Marionette Theater, hosted by Vroman’s Bookstore. vromansbookstore.com/upcoming-events.

Feb. 16: In-person event at 8 a.m. with author Randal J. Metz and Alex Evans, head puppeteer at Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Tickets to the breakfast talk hosted by the Los Angeles Breakfast Club are $25. Enchantedlabc.eventbrite.com.

Feb. 16: In-person event at 7:30 p.m. with author Randal J. Metz and Alex Evans, head puppeteer at Bob Baker Marionette Theater, at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles. Skylightbooks.com/event.