Long Story Short

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This is my design for an origami book. It’s called “long story short” because you can make the book as long as you wish (any number of pages) and at the same time it takes only a short time to fold.

The design is absurdly simple so maybe someone has already come up with it before. It starts with a long strip of paper which is then folded back in order to achieve the color change for the book’s cover, then the strip is thinned and pleated to form the pages. Since this model relies on paper’s memory to hold the shape, it works best with foil-backed paper, but it also works quite well with plain copy paper.

A very interesting property of this model is that there are no reference points in folding and even the paper’s proportions do not have to match any specific rule as long as the strip is sufficiently skinny (1:10 is a good start). All folding is done approximately and by making guesses, you control the proportions of the book: how much smaller the pages are than the cover and how many pages there are.