Origami: The Art of Paperfolding

by Robert Harbin

Detailed diagrams demonstrate the procedures for creating animals, people, and objects from paper

Genres: Nonfiction, Origami, Reference, Games, Crafts

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Robert Harbin, also known as Ned Williams, was a British stage magician. He is well-known for his books on origami.

Reviews

[Manny]

This figure is associated for me with one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I have never been able to bring myself to tell the story before, but, what the hell, it happened well over 30 years ago. So why not come clean?

At the time, I had a girlfriend I'll call L (her name actually starts with another letter). L had a friend I'll call M, who was extremely attractive in a slutty kind of way; I lost contact with her some time in the early 80s, but I heard that she became some kind of high-class hooker. "It's amazing how much money you can make in one evening!" was the last message I received from her, passed on through a mutual friend. I hope things worked out. But when this story occurs, all that was far in the future, and she was just a teenage school-girl.

Now I was dating L, and a friend of mine was dating M, and I'd spent rather too much time in M's company. She was the sort of woman who just turned on the charm for any guy who happened to be in the vicinity, and I'd been in her vicinity a whole lot. I began to get the entirely misguided idea that M had developed the same kind of lustful feelings for me as I had for her.

But even with that introduction, I can't reconstruct my thought-processes on the evening before Valentine's Day. I can only conclude that my mind had completely switched off. Let me simply tell you what I did, and your guess will be as good as mine when it comes to imagining what was going on inside my head. I had a copy of this book, and I was quite handy at folding origami figures. I'd just learned to fold the cat shown above. I made L a nice Valentine's Day card with the figure pasted in on one side and the text (these words are unfortunately engraved on my memory) "As one cat to another, you're purr-fect!". And then I made a duplicate card for M and delivered both of them.

Well, I shall not tell you the details of what happened next, but let's just say that it wasn't pretty. I learned a valuable lesson from this experience: do not fold more than one origami figure a day.

[Aaron]

3.5/5: a true classic, and one of the early english books on the subject matter, which sparked off a childhood fascination with the wonders of paper folding and structural aesthetics. heartily recommended for all ages -- the frog was my classic mainstay in conversational-starters amongst my classmates for a long while -- and continued even decades later when dating my to-be wife (who thankfully, happened to like frogs)

[Barbc]

5

[Don Gubler]

Nice book.

[Connie]

fun book to mess around with.