Dear Gerardo July 9, 2016 Thanks for raising the question again! Here are 2 possibilities for European examples.
The oldest preserved fold that I've seen is the traditional Seed Packet in the Linnaeus Museum/Botanical Garden, Uppsala, Sweden. http://www.linnaeus.se/link3.html It's very small and labeled by Carl Linnaeus himself (1707 – 10 January 1778) -- so it's at least 238 years old. I believe it still contains specimen seeds. I wasn't able to inspect it closely on my visit, but I think the folding method may be slightly different from D. Petty's Seed Packet diagrams. I don't have a photo, but I know some of the people at the museum and could ask about getting one. *Linnaeus Museum *mus...@linnaeus.se, i...@linnaeus.se Norman Brosterman's collection http://www.brosterman.com/kindergarten.shtml might include some early 19th century Froebel and/or Pestalozzi kindergarten origami folds. Unfortunately, the wonderful images on his website (e.g. http://www.brosterman.com/kindergarten_pages/image43.shtml) don't give details about dates or provenance. His book might give useful leads: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/07/reviews/970907.07elkindt.html New York Times review by David Elkind of INVENTING KINDERGARTEN By Norman Brosterman. Illustrated. 160 pp. New York: Harry N. Abrams. $39.95. "Born in Oberweissbach in central Germany, Froebel (1782-1852) was trained in science and became a teacher at a model school in Frankfurt in 1805. He studied with the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi [1746-1827] the first to translate Rousseau's radical educational philosophy into practice -- and developed a distrust of formal education as he began to put faith in children's ability to learn through play, or activities that they initiated and directed themselves....The kindergarten idea caught on quickly, and by the turn of the century thousands of kindergartens were part of the educational landscape. It's this universality that leads Brosterman to contend that modern art and architecture derive, at least in part, from many modern artists' having attended Froebelian kindergartens. He compares exceptional creations of children in the classroom to the paintings of Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and he sees extraordinary parallels between the artwork of kindergartners and that of the Cubists. Equally striking, he feels, are the similarities between children's origami shapes and the architectural drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier...." Wishing David Lister were alive to tell us the answer! Karen Karen Reeds, co-ringleader, Princeton Public Library Origami Group. Affiliate of Origami USA, http://origamiusa.org/ We usually meet 2nd Wednesday of the month, 6:30-8pm, 3rd floor. Free! We provide paper! All welcome! (Kids under 8, please bring a grown-up.) Princeton Public Library info: 609.924.9529 http://princetonlibrary.org/ Celebrating 10 years of folding together in Princeton! Our next meeting: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 karenmre...@gmail.com
