by Ian Sansom
It seems a truism that without playing cards, many of us would have more money, but in fact without playing cards, we wouldn’t have any money at all. Or certainly not money as we know it today. It was through developments in the making of specialist paper and inks for the manufacture of playing cards that printers devised what are now the standard methods for security printing—which is to say, the printing of money, stamps, passports and official papers and licenses. And so, briefly, in conclusion, for masochists and gamblers worldwide, the cheering tale of how cards once made money, rather than helped us to lose it.
In 1830, Thomas de la Rue, a printer born in Guernsey, having experimented with a brief, unlikely career making straw hats, established himself in business with a couple of partners in London as “Cardmakers, Hot Pressers and Enamellers.” The business flourished—and the success was built on playing cards. (It’s said that Thomas Andros de la Rue, grandson of Thomas, had the houses on Cadogan Square renumbered so that his would be number 52, to honor the source of the family’s fortune.) In order to produce identical, patterned card backs—and thus to prevent players from being able to cheat by identifying marks on the backs of plain white cards—Thomas de la Rue developed a method of making lines “like the checks of tartan” using a “cloth of wires” on a Jacquard loom. In 1840 he was awarded a patent for “Improvements in printing calicoes and surfaces,” applying his card-making methods to printing “bankers checks, bills, etc. bank notes, post office envelopes or any work requiring great difficulty of invention.” By 1853, de la Rue had secured a contract from the Inland Revenue to produce adhesive revenue stamps for drafts and receipts; by 1855 the company had produced its first postage stamp; and by 1860 it had begun printing banknotes. And it produces them still today, for over 150 countries. According to company records, de La Rue’s pretax profits for 2011 rose to £57.7 million (approximately $98.7 million), and at the time of writing, in May 2012, it was busy denying rumors that it was producing drachmas in anticipation of Greece leaving the eurozone. Le jeu pour le jeu? Serious business.
10
A WONDERFUL MENTAL AND PHYSICAL THERAPY
Origami is not meant to be a simple art. To the expert, it is a challenge to the eye, the brain, and the fingers, a wonderful mental and physical therapy.
ROBERT HARBIN, Origami: The Art of Paper-Folding (1968)
Three-dimensional paper construction made from brown wrapping paper
Detail of cover illustration of The Still Point by Amy Sackville published by Portobello Books. Art Direction: Clare Skeats, Paper Sculpture: Helen Musselwhite © Helen Musselwhite
On Friday, July 24, 1992, a Mrs. Lillian Rose Vorhaus Oppenheimer, ninety-three years old and a native New Yorker, died of complications after a heart operation at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. Mrs. Oppenheimer was survived by her four children by her first husband, Mr. Joseph B. Kruskal, by her four stepchildren by her second husband, Mr. Harry C. Oppenheimer, by her twenty-six grandchildren, thirty great-grandchildren, and by anyone who has ever had a serious interest in origami.
There is a common belief that origami is an ancient art with mystical origins in Japan that was brought to the West long ago by nameless pioneer paper folders. In fact, origami as we know it today has its origins in Lillian Oppenheimer’s apartment on top of the Hotel Irving, in Gramercy Park, Manhattan, where she established the Origami Center of America in 1958. Indeed, the entire history of origami in the twentieth century might be told as Oppenheimer’s story, the uplifting tale of a New York socialite who overcame tragedy and found purpose in life through paper folding. Or it might equally be told as the cautionary tale of a maverick Jewish sexologist whose pioneering work on a bibliography of an obscure subject brought origami to worldwide attention, but whose controversial opinions and behaviors consigned him to the margins of the very enterprise he had helped to establish. Or indeed as the story of a South African stage illusionist who achieved everlasting fame through folding tiny figures on TV. Or perhaps as a heroic folktale, of how a humble, self-taught Japanese paper-folding genius was saved from a life of obscurity as a door-to-door salesman by a series of chance encounters. These are all versions of the incredible recent history of paper folding—a history with as many folds and creases as an origami rhombicuboctahedron, or one of origami master Satoshi Kamiya’s famous one-sheet, folds-only, super-lifelike scaly dragons. Paper doesn’t merely record drama: it enacts drama. It doesn’t merely tell a story: it is a story.
Lillian Oppenheimer first took up paper folding in 1928, when her young daughter was in the hospital recovering from a serious operation and Lillian found that she had 1) time on her hands; and 2) a copy of a popular new book by William D. Murray and Francis J. Rigney, titled Fun with Paperfolding—the first book in English devoted solely to the art and craft of paper folding. Lillian sat in the hospital waiting room making models, her daughter recovered, they returned home, and Lillian got on with the serious business of raising her family. Twenty years later, when her husband became ill, she once again found herself stuck in hospital waiting rooms, and once again found herself playing with paper. After the death of her husband, she took handicraft classes at the New School for Social Research in New York with a young woman who had trained as a kindergarten teacher in Germany, and who taught the class some basic paper-folding techniques. Enthused, Lillian started reading books about the craft, and began meeting friends and others to share models and ideas: she preferred the exotic term “origami” to plain old “paper folding.” (In its original context, origami—from “oru,” to fold, and “kami,” paper—refers specifically to folded certificates rather than to recreational paper folding, but it had gradually been adopted as a common term for paper craft in Japan.) When an article about Lillian and her origami evenings appeared in the New York Times in June 1958, people started asking for lessons and demonstrations, and so the Origami Center of America was born, meeting on Monday evenings and Tuesday afternoons in Lillian’s apartment in the Hotel Irving. In the words of her friend and fellow paper folder Florence Temko, “In these meetings, Lillian established the spirit that pervades the origami world to this day. We all folded together and whoever had come across something new or created a model, shared it with the others.” Late in life, Lillian had found her role. She helped organize the first origami exhibition in America, at the Cooper Union Museum in New York in 1959, she began producing a newsletter, The Origamian, and she visited and corresponded with origamists and enthusiasts around the world. She was also, incidentally, a puppeteer, one of the founding members of the Puppetry Guild of Greater New York, and an amateur ventriloquist, writing books with her friend Shari “Lamb Chop” Lewis. She was, in other words, a phenomenon. International Origami Day is rightly celebrated on October 24, Lillian’s birthday: she is, without doubt, the founder of origami as a popular modern recreation.
As for the maverick Jewish sexologist . . . Gershon Legman was the amazingly freethinking son of immigrants, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He was a man of broad tastes and enormous energies: often credited as one of the inventors of the modern vibrating dildo, an achievement more than sufficient to secure both his notoriety and his fame, he also worked for the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and at the age of just twenty-three he published a book memorably titled Oragenitalism: An Encyclopaedic Outline of Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation. Part 1: Cunnilinctus (1940), with ambitious plans for a follow-up book on fellatio. (His poor parents had hoped he’d become a rabbi.) Oragenitalism was effectively banned when its publisher’s premises were raided by police. Undeterred, Legman went on to publish numerous other studies of sexual behavior and folklore, including The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964) and The Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1968). Apparently, allegedly—the legends of Legman are legion—he took up paper folding merely as a hobby after an accident, but he pursued it with the same enthusiasm and determination as his wide-ranging studies in sex. He researc
hed both the history and the contemporary worldwide practice of paper folding, and compiled and published a bibliography of his findings in 1952. He named the standard four-cornered origami fold the “blintz” fold (though somehow he seems to have confused his blintzes with his knishes, a blintz being a kind of rolled pancake, and a knish something more recognizably folded), and in the early 1950s he sought out an obscure paper folder in Japan, named Akira Yoshizawa, and brought his work to Europe.
Legman’s place in the pantheon of paper folding was therefore assured—except that he managed to fall out with many of his fellow paper folders, and so became the black sheep of the family. He resigned from the United States Origami Association, according to his biographer, Mikita Brottman, over an argument about “a badly bent corner,” and David Lister, a retired solicitor from Grimsby who is perhaps the most unlikely but undoubtedly the greatest living Western authority on origami history, remarks, with studied understatement, that “It is unfortunate that Legman often adopted an aggressive personal manner.” A friend, the writer John Clellon Holmes, described Legman as a “psychiatric Genghis Khan.” If Oppenheimer is origami’s mother figure, Legman is undoubtedly the wayward uncle.
And that obscure paper folder, Akira Yoshizawa? Yoshizawa is in fact modern origami’s great-grandfather, the father of the multitude. Born into a family of farmers, Yoshizawa worked as a draftsman and studied for the Buddhist priesthood before deciding to pursue origami full-time, surviving by selling condiments and snacks door-to-door. Already age forty, in 1951 he was invited by the editor of a prestigious Japanese pictorial magazine, Asahi Graph—similar to Life magazine in the USA—to produce some models to be photographed for publication. Finally, his reputation began to spread. In 1953 he was contacted by Legman, who helped organize an exhibition of his work in Amsterdam, and in 1954 Yoshizawa published his first book, Atarashi Origami Gejijutsu (New Paper-Folding Art). With fellow origami artist Sam Randlett he established the internationally accepted system of notation for origami folds, the Yoshizawa-Randlett system, with its now-familiar little arrows and dotted lines; he also developed the technique of so-called wet folding, which is exactly as its name suggests; and, most important, he produced models of exquisite beauty. His trademark gorillas are a wonder: perfectly proportioned baby Kongs. He was, simply, a great artist.
Paper-folded dragon
And to complete this strange family picture? The bespectacled, balding South African stage illusionist Robert Harbin: modern origami’s father figure. I should perhaps admit an interest here: the first book I ever bought, long before I bought a novel or any slim volume of verse, was one of Harbin’s guides to origami, Origami 3: The Art of Paper-Folding (1972). I’d missed Origami 1 and Origami 2, but as a teenager I seem to have been attracted to the idea of being able to make creatures out of almost nothing, and with no tools, using only my hands—Origami 3 features a couple of startlingly bright green turtles on the cover, crawling across sand as if they’ve just emerged, fresh spawned, from the primordial swamp—and I was inspired also by Harbin’s TV series, Origami, which used to be on when I got home from school.
Harbin was a conjuror who had become fascinated by paper folding as a kind of trick or show, and whose Paper Magic (1956) was one of the pioneering English works on the subject. He got to know Legman and Oppenheimer, corresponded with Yoshizawa, and became the first president of the British Origami Society—he was an authority—but on television he would simply sit at a table, address the camera familiarly and directly, and talk you through the making of a model, step-by-step. He made it sound easy. Watching Harbin I think I realized that paper folding was in some profound way about making things smaller and simpler, and as a teenager I perhaps had the sense, like a lot of teenagers, that I myself wished to be smaller and simpler, to be able to disappear almost, to enfold and enclose myself and to become something different, and of the essence. Unfortunately, although I had Harbin’s book as a guide, I soon discovered that there was no actual origami paper to be had in Essex in the 1970s. Indeed, in our house, there was hardly any paper to be had at all. My father would occasionally smuggle some A4 sheets home from work, and I would cut these down into squares, but it was too thick and too white to be able to make satisfactory models. I eventually found that carbon paper was much better for folding, except that it left your hands blue-black; so throughout the mid-1970s I fought a long and lonely battle with paper, attempting to fold mucky, flimsy dolphins, and birds, and dogs, and weird little pointless boxes. I never could do Harbin’s turtle.
Oppenheimer, Legman, Yoshizawa, Harbin: these are just some of the characters in the strange history of paper folding. There are many others, as amazing as they are unexpected: Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish novelist and philosopher, who loved to fold “parajitas,” little birds; Adolfo Cerceda, the Argentinian professional knife thrower turned paper folder; the matronly and massively prolific Florence Temko, every beginning folder’s best friend; polymathematic Martin Gardner, the popular science writer who promoted origami through his long-running column in Scientific American; dear Alfred Bestall, the children’s illustrator and cartoonist who drew Rupert Bear for the Daily Express, and whose Rupert annuals traditionally included an origami model; the magnificently prosaic John Smith, who in the 1970s invented what is now called Pureland origami, which allows only for the simplest of folds; the incredible Robert Lang, the onetime research scientist turned full-time paper folder and one of the new wave of precision paper folders to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, who works with laser cutters to make his folds, and designs his work using his own specialist origami software; and of course Sadako Sasaki, the little girl who survived the bombing of Hiroshima, but who developed leukemia, caused by the radiation, and who in the hospital, dying, folded a thousand paper cranes, that they might bring her good luck, and whose friends and classmates built a memorial for her in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, where to this day people fold paper cranes to honor her memory.
But enough about the people. What about the paper? The first thing to be said about origami paper is that it’s not ordinary paper, as I discovered to my cost as a teenager. Ordinary paper is usually rectangular, while origami paper is usually square. (David Lister suggests that origami paper is square not merely because a square has unique geometrical properties—what doesn’t?—but because a square always has the same geometrical proportions, and so patterns and diagrams for folding square paper are easily transmissible; origami’s fundamental squareness, one might say, is the reason for its popularity.) Ordinary paper is white; origami paper comes in many colors. Ordinary paper can be bought by the ream at stationery stores; origami paper is available mostly in Japan, or on the Internet. In the West, the most widely available origami paper is kami, which comes in packs of thin, square, uncoated paper, six-inch or ten-inch, colored on one side and white on the other. This is what we think of as traditional origami paper. And as with most traditions, it’s about as traditional as a ploughman’s lunch, Christmas trees—or, indeed, Christmas itself. (Everyone knows it was the Victorians who invented Christmas, but it might be more accurate to say that it was the Victorians who invented Christmas as a cheap pulp Saturnalia, complete with cards, puzzles, board games and decorations. Paper makes Christmas. And so does origami: the entomologist Alice Gray, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, who was a friend of Lillian Oppenheimer’s, used to dress the Christmas tree at the museum with origami models, and the origami Christmas tree is now a museum tradition of long standing. Gray’s book The Magic of Origami (1977) contains an excellent section on origami Christmas models, though the great Florence Temko trumps it with her all-inclusive Origami Holiday Decorations (2003), which contains paper decorations suitable also for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.)
The nontraditional traditional Western kami paper—the word in Japanese can refer to any kind of paper—seems to have been developed for use by children, and perhaps derives from the style of paper used by the Froebel kindergartens. Fried
rich Froebel was a nineteenth-century German educationalist who believed in educating children through play, using a number of what he called “gifts” and “occupations.” The gifts consisted of wooden blocks and balls and sticks, and the occupations were exercises in understanding the properties of solids and surfaces and lines, using the gifts and other materials including beans, seeds, pebbles and pieces of string. Papierfalten—paper folding—was one of the occupations designed to teach children about surfaces. An enthusiastic account of the newfangled Froebelian methods in Dickens’s Household Words in 1855 noted in particular that “By cutting paper, patterns are produced in the Infant Garden that would often, through the work of very little hands, be received in schools of design with acclamation.” Froebel kindergartens usually used paper that was blue on one side and white on the other, the contrast being useful because it aided the understanding of geometry and shape, and useful also because it was cheaper to have one side uncolored. The first Japanese Froebel kindergarten was opened in Tokyo in 1876, and the idea of the gifts and occupations—including paper folding—influenced the development of Japanese educational practice and philosophy. In an example of what one might call reverse-fold colonialism, origami paper has therefore made a long journey first from Germany to Japan, and then from Japan back to the West.