> On Mar 19, 2018, at 5:32 PM, Karen Reeds <karenmre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hi, Wolf, 3/19/2018 > > I really hope you'll share your paper with the O-List! > > I'm skeptical that there was a single cause for the world-wide rise of > interest in origami. And I also doubt that the Ngram can give a complete, > fine-grained picture of the timing, especially for the early years. >
I second Karen Reeds in that there is probably not a single cause for the expansion of origami books in the ‘80s. I would just add that that the critical mass happend not because of one or two best-seller authors, but because books were being sold worldwide at increasing number since the mid ’50s, which led to big publishers to agree on printing new authors, something that in the 60’s and even in the ‘70s would have been very difficult to achieve. In general, publishers were reluctant to accept books that look “difficult” (there is extensive proof from letters of that time between frustrated origami creators). So once the gates were opened, more authors were given the opportunity to bring in their creations and have their books published. The “big wave” started with easy books, and the first worldwide best seller author was Isao Honda. The archienemy of Akira Yoshizawa, Honda had the bright idea of producing books with actual origami foldings, which delighted kids everywhere. Those were mostly easy books (later, the beautifully illustrated books by Tatsuo Miyawaki, followed on the idea of Honda with real origami models in each page). I have an interesting news clipping from the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbum (May 10, 1959) praising the worldwide acceptance of origami books by Isao Honda. I just quote a startling paragraph from that article: “Some of tens of thousands of each of these three volumes were expoerted, and soon became best sellers, breaking the one time record of the Japan Publication Export of the Judo Book of Kyuzo Mifune. The point of these publications is that besides illustrations origami models are pasted on each page” [the bold highlight is mine] Once the publishers realized that books about origami sold well, they began to accept ideas of more complex models. If there were a handful of creators in the 60’s, the field in the next decades was ripe for a change and more authors that had been holding their desire to come to light finally got a place in the agenda of those publishers. Laura Rozenberg
