How the Catalogue Is Organised
The books group by what they are about and by how they fold, and the two groupings overlap.
New releases and image making covers the most recent work, including Folding Space Ship, Galactic Narrowboat, Europa and Camino de Santiago.
Science fiction runs from Folding Space Ship through Galactic Narrowboat, Europa, Planets, Alien Invasion and Journey to the Centre, plus the two Modern Constructivist booklets.
Picture books holds the narrative titles: The Octopus Would Like to Put a Stop to Us, Frog Heart, Cook Food Book, Invasive Species, The Dark Tribe and We Will Rule the World.
Races collects Still Running and its companions; conceptual holds Book Jacket, Dance, Cell Division and Schroedinger’s Card.
Places contains the location work — Flat Holm and Camino de Santiago.
Manuals is the instructional set: Screen Printing Manual, Advanced Screen Printing, Screen Printing Basics, Photoshop for Screen Printing and Multichannel.
What a Listing Tells You
Every title carries the same specification block, and it is worth knowing how to read it. Folded size and unfolded size are both given because many of the books open into something much larger than they appear closed. The paper is named by weight and stock. The colour count is the number of screens, and therefore the number of separate passes through the press.
The date is the month the edition was printed, not the year it was designed, and the edition size is the number of copies that exist.
Folded size, unfolded size, stock, colour count, month, edition. Every entry carries the same six.
Editions
Runs are small by the standards of publishing and normal by the standards of hand printing: a test edition of thirty, a first edition of forty five, a commissioned edition of eighty split with the commissioner, a signed edition of one hundred. Where a second edition exists it is noted as such, because a reprint means the stencils were remade rather than rerun.
Titles that sold out were generally not reprinted.
How the Catalogue Is Organised
The list is grouped by what a book is about and then by how it is built, and the two groupings do not line up. Science fiction covers Folding Space Ship, Galactic Narrowboat, Europa, Planets, Alien Invasion, Micro Voyage and Journey to the Centre. The picture books hold The Octopus, Frog Heart, Races, Still Running, Invasive Species, Dark Tribe, Cook Food Book and the paper subjects such as Paper Plane, Folding Bike, Wooden Horse and Narrow Boat. A third group is tied to places: Flat Holm, Camino de Santiago and the Bristol retail centres. The manuals sit apart from all of it.
A title can move between groups when it is reissued in another structure, which is why Europa appears both as a case-bound book and as a folded one, and why We Will Rule the World is listed twice at two very different edition sizes.
Where the Books Went
The catalogue was not sold mainly from a website. From 1995 onwards the books were shown at artists’ book fairs in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and the fair is where most of these editions found their readers.
That circuit explains several things about the list. Editions are small because a fair table sells in tens, not thousands. Formats are unusual because a book that has to be picked up and unfolded to be understood does badly in a catalogue photograph and well in the hand. And the titles with ISBNs exist because a fair introduces books to shops and libraries that then need an ordinary way to order them.
The Paper Subjects
A small group of titles takes folding itself as the subject: Paper Plane, Folding Bike, Wooden Horse and Narrow Boat. Each is a thing that is made by folding or that folds away, which makes the structure of the book and the thing it depicts the same idea seen twice.