Book #40

Accordion

After the scroll, the accordion structure emerged in an attempt to make lengthy texts more accessible. Rather than unrolling a whole scroll to find some detail at the end of the text, the reader could just flip through the folds of the accordion to find the text they needed. Accordion books are still very popular for artists and there are many ways to elaborate the structure. This example shown here, Trees, is the most basic accordion: just a long strip of paper that has been folded into equal sections.

A note on the content of this particular book:
I made this book a couple years ago in a workshop about page design. The page size was determined by a musical interval (diminished 5th). The position of each text box was determined by the application of Villard de Honnecourt's diagram across each spread. The text is a list of the trees of Michigan (since I was in Michigan at the time), using their latin names. The trees are hand-drawn, branching out from the valley folds.