Prehistoric Origami
John Montroll, (c) 1989, Dover Publications; ISBN 0-486-26588-9

Since I went off to college, I had routinely been checking the (usually very small) origami subsection of the crafts section of any vaguely comprehensive bookstore I happened across, in case another really good book turned up. Mom must have shopped better bookstores; she dug up another set of Montroll books for my birthday, in 1991 republication. (Unfortunately my copies are half the area of the previous two , and seem to be glued not sewn, so they don't lay flat without substantial encouragement.)

The book's models are ordered by increasing difficulty, roughly; similar critters, such as flying beasties, are grouped together. Each is folded from an uncut square. The book also contains a brief explanation of the symbols used to indicate various folds, several pages explaining basic folds and bases, and a page about "wet folding" technique by Rosalind Joyce. In addition, each critter's directions are preceded by a pronunciation guide and a brief (educational :-) description.

Here are the critters you learn to fold. ("Steps" is really the number of illustrations, not the total number of folds, which would have been more tedious to count. It's still a reasonable indicator of complexity, though.)

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Last modified 20 June 1996
Bridget Spitznagel
sprite@cs.cmu.edu