A new page

A few months ago I made a Dream Journal for an exhibition at Auckland City Libraries. I made the pages as mobius strips with dreams written on them. I liked the concept but was disappointed with the execution: mobius strips are difficult to bind because they are one sided and book making usually involves pages with two or more sides. A book of one sided pages is an Escher fantasy.

Despite, or because of, this less than satisfactory first attemp I have continued to think about mobius strip books. The other day I experimented with mobius strips using a variety of materials and proportions. The photos above are my favourite: a big wide strip of heavy creamy printing paper making a curvaceous page of 40 x 35 x 25 cm.

I'm working on the binding options for this wonderful creation. I also made a smaller set of mobius strips out of tracing paper and bound them to a ribbon which, hanging on the wall, looks very much like a spine- imagine a row of big vertebrae strung like a dinasaur's back bone. I think a double binding might also work well. The trick with mobius strips seems to be making sure they are lined up as though they could nest together, but of course they can't actually nest because that would require them to have an inside and an outside and they only have one side.