A paperfolding paradise

The website of writer and paperfolding designer David Mitchell

A Chronology of Paperfolding History

The following four sections provide Indexes to various broad categories of designs and paperfolding techniques, although, in many cases material from the main sources and individual design pages has not yet been fully carried over. While this means that you cannot (yet) necessarily rely on them for a historical narrative of the topic they cover, you can still use them to find out what designs in that particular category have a page of their own and to locate many designs which do not (yet) merit an individual page.

The next section is probably the one that you will want to use the most. It provides pages about Individual Designs, including all the best known 'traditional' designs (and some that you may never have heard of before). Designs tend to have different names in different books, at different times and, of course, in different languages. To simplify this situation I have given each of the designs that have an Individual Design Page a standard name. Usually this name is in English, but sometimes it is in another language. These standard names are used in the headings in the Index Pages and in the main body of the Source Pages (see below), where they appear in bold. This should, hopefully, help you find the Individual Design Page for the design you are looking for. If you cannot find a classic or 'traditional' design in these pages please feel free to contact me.

If you want information about, for instance, the history of paper planes in general, you can find this in the Index Pages - Inanimate Objects section. If you want to look up the history of one particularly paper plane, say the Paper Dart or the Swallow, you can find this in the section about Individual Designs.

Individual Designs generally only have their own pages if they occur several times in the literature. Details of designs that only appear once or twice may not have their own page but information about them will appear in the Index Pages.

Finally, right at the foot of this page, there is a section about Sources, which provides information about many of the historical documents on which the other pages are based, and, in many cases, provides a link to a full online version of the document the information is drawn from. If you know of any other significant sources of information that I have overlooked please let me know.

Where sources are shown but are not yet linked to pages it means I have information on what they contain but have not yet found time to add the information here.

Where sources are marked 'incomplete information' it means I have not yet been able to obtain a full print copy or find a full electronic copy on line. If you can make up for these deficiences I will be extremely grateful.

Where sources are marked 'not yet integrated' it means I have not yet carried the information they contain over to the Index and Individual Design pages.

Where pages are marked 'incomplete' it means that I have information that has not yet been added to these pages, in some cases a great deal of information.

All pages are subject to updating as new information becomes available.

Closely connected designs may share the same page.

Some designs, mostly those which only occur once in the literature (or in multiple books by the same author) are not recorded separately in this section. You can, however, locate them through the Index Pages sections above.

Other Sources Consulted / Searched

Undated Postcards / Undated Trade Cards / Undated Drawings, Prints and Paintings