I spent a fair amount of time studying, thinking about, and playing around with designs for books that really don’t have a spine holding the back of a text block in place, and may not even have a text block in the traditional sense of signatures sewn together to form a spine with endbands and supporting cords or tapes.

The first three of my spineless book structures all had fish and fishing as a theme.  The first was like an “accordion” book, except that it did not contain concertina-folded paper.  It was made of paper folded in a basic origami-fold square, set in opposition, then glued together to form a “text block” that is one 21”-long piece.  The book is remarkably snaky, and can twist in a number of different directions.

 
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The First in the Spineless Fish series

Making this book was a lot of fun.  I made rubber stamps using foam of various densities and plywood.  One was shaped to be seaweed, and was very successful, and appeared in both other fish books.  Others were intended to represent bubbles.  Making photocopies of fish out of old textbooks, I used a Chartpack marker that was colorless to moisten the copy paper behind the toner, which freed the toner from the copy paper and allowed me to transfer the image onto my paper planographically.

On the back side of the sheet (not shown), I used stencil brushes to apply gouache, using rounded shapes to mask certain areas of the paper.  The overall effect I was seeking was looking around under water.

The first one I made for my daughter.  Everyone who saw it remarked on it so much that I made another, which I still have available.