“Folding Plates in Esoteric Literature”

William Kiesel, founder of Ouroboros Press, has an insightful essay with impressive examples of the “fold out” device here. Among the examples are

Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Age and Codex Rosicrucis

Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum

Zoroaster’s Telescope: The Key to the great divinatory Kabbala of the Magi

Napoleon’s Book of Fate

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De Occulta Philosophia

Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Solomon Regis

E. A. Budge’s The Book of the Dead

Don’t let the occultism of the examples put you off. After all, the earliest forays into movable books occurred in alchemical and Kabbalistic tomes. As Kiesel, also a book maker, points out:

Opening a folding plate causes an interruption in the reading process. It offers the reader an opportunity to think about what was read while contemplating the materials on the printed sheet. Again alchemy and mysticism share this meditative approach, a kind of inner reading read through the visual language of the birds or abecedarium.

From the screenshot of one of his productions above, you may be able to make out the book’s author: Count Michael Maier, whose more famous emblem book Atalanta Fugiens Daniel E. Kelm transformed into the Möbius version Neo Emblemata Nova.

Neo Emblemata Nova (2005)

Neo Emblemata Nova (2005)
Daniel E. Kelm
Box: H96 x W109 x D102 mm closed.
Booklet cover: H72 x W79 mm closed, H72 x W224 mm open.
Booklet: H72 x W78 mm.
Möbius strip: each tile is H70 x W70 mm; the strip extended is 1000 mm.
Edition of twenty-one, of which this is #18.
Acquired from the artist, 20 October 2018.

Opening the work.

Booklet about the work and its creation.

Inside the top of the box.

Closing and returning the Möbius strip to its box requires considerably more dexterity than reading; so much so that the booklet included provides instructions.

The Anatomy Lesson (2004)

The Anatomy Lesson (2004)
Joyce Cutler-Shaw
Middletown, CT: Robin Price, Publisher, 2004)
Limited edition of 50, of which this signed copy is the binder’s copy (Daniel E. Kelm). Acquired from the binder, 20 October 2018.

Top of case removed to show book with embedded hologram on cover

Twelve signatures of handmade cotton text paper, the central ten signatures each made up of one sheet H356 x W514 mm and one sheet H356 x W500 mm glued to the 14 mm margin of the first sheet, for a total of ninety-six pages, each measuring H356 x W253 mm.
Binding of leather covered boards (a hologram embedded in front cover) with an open spine, taped and sewn into a reinforcing concertina structure: H361 X W259 mm.
Contained in engraved steel box: H370 x W326 x D44 mm.

Book removed from case, viewed horizontally, spine showing

Detail of sewing and internal view of reinforcing accordion structure. For a description of this type of structure, see Hedi Kyle’s The Art of the Fold (London: Laurence King, 2018), pp. 82-85.