This is adapted from an article published in British Origami, 352, June 2025.
I recently came across “Toy Fights: A Boyhood” (Faber, 2023), a memoir by Don Paterson (1), and was drawn to its chapter on his adolescent obsession with origami, “Donald Is Seeking Fellow Paper-Folders”:
The day before the British Origami Society newsletter turned up, I would be confined to bed with anticipatory stomach ache. At my parents’ panicked insistence, I wrote to the Evening Telegraph, hoping they could help me recruit similarly paper-obsessed chums; they made it their lead letter, and sent a lad round to the tenement to take my photograph. I was pictured (ten years old, porky, hair like a lassie, trying to look devastatingly intense) surrounded by ‘a great number of models, several of my own design’, under the headline ‘Donald Is Seeking Fellow Paper-Folders’….
The kids who turned up wanted to make water bombs and aeroplanes. They brought no paper. I watched in horror as they helped themselves to great wads of my handmade Japanese squares for their botched little crumplings, and wept with joy when they left.
Unfortunately, I can’t find his letter in the newspaper archives, but the mental image may be more vivid than the printed letter. One of the causes of Paterson’s disillusionment with origami was the “Smallest Crane In The World”:
Moreover, I was an official failure: I had entered a British Origami Society competition to fold the world’s smallest flapping bird…. I took about three days over it, mounted it in a little cellophane envelope, and sent it off. I came fifth. The others were smaller, neater and – this cut me to the quick – ‘more professionally presented’. The winner was an Italian who had folded his from a 2 × 2mm square at Padua University under an electron microscope or something, and mounted it on the tip of a pin in a tiny glass globe.
Another cause was Yoshizawa’s superior folding, and Paterson’s invention of “adult origami’:
I sent meticulous diagrams for these models off to the BOS newsletter and waited for my life membership by return of post. I mean, they’d have to make me a fellow, at the very least. After six months of deepening silence I quit staring at the letter box and retired to my room, not with one of my many volumes of Montoya or Randlett, but the Lingerie and woefully underrated Shower Curtains section of the Grattan’s mail-order catalogue, and began my next phase of study in earnest.
Perhaps Paterson would appreciate the belated mention is his once-beloved British Origami newsletter. He still folds occasionally, unlike David Nicholls (2) of ‘One Day’ fame. Nicholls’ piece for The Times (19 December 2009) is more downbeat and his disillusionment seems to be permanent.
Sparked by trying to throw out Robert Harbin’s Origami 4 (‘the most complex and ambiguous, the Empire Strikes Back of the series’), Nicholls recalls his teenage obsession:
By Warminster, a crowd had begun to form as I sat there in shorts and school shoes, with a pudding-bowl haircut, folding away to gasps and sighs. I felt like a young God. In the back of my mind, I started to weigh up the possibility of one day folding professionally. I’d travel the world, performing to packed auditoriums in a jump suit sponsored by Benson & Hedges.
But it was in my early teens that I began to fold hard. I sent away for specialised papers and multicoloured foils and books in Japanese, partly in the belief that origami was a good way to attract girls. In retrospect I realise this was a fallacy, but what else could I do? The back cover of the books claimed it was ‘intellectual’ … Even in movies, origami was shorthand for ‘charismatic genius’ or possibly ‘serial killer’.
the 1970s origami scene:
American origami of the Seventies was literal and figurative, with a pop-art twist: Charlie Chaplin, or Sherlock Holmes smoking a pipe, or a Mexican in a sombrero. British origami was homely and suburban and smelt of sprouts: dogs and cats, hats and boats; something your jolly uncle might do at a party. Japanese origami was balanced and poised, elegant and austere. My own style was terrible: literal and naturalistic.
and later disillusionment:
But sitting in on a Saturday night, turning a square of paper into a portrait of Joseph Stalin, I realised the thrill was gone. … Looking back, everything I took to be charismatic and sophisticated about my hobby seems suburban and absurd now … Origami taught me nothing. It brought me no friends, no laughter, it didn’t make me smarter or healthier, more dextrous or relaxed. I’m not even sure it was fun.
This may well have been true, but “I can’t help thinking he could have phrased it a little more gently”, as Nicholls himself wrote about Harbin’s introduction to Origami 4 (‘Origami is suitable for people with nervous and muscular conditions, for those on long journeys and for lonely people’).
Whilst Paterson’s mother brought him Robert Harbin’s Origami 2, Nicholls found Robert Harbin’s Origami 1 in a library. Origami 3 was Ian Sansom’s (3) gateway to the world of origami. In “Paper: An Elegy” (Fourth Estate, 2012) he devotes a chapter to origami, mainly its history and relationship with papercutting. The short section about his teenage origami years is also a dismal and tragi-comic experience, and Robert Harbin also features again. From chapter 10, “A Wonderful Mental And Physical Therapy”:
Harbin was a conjuror who had become fascinated by paper folding as a kind of trick or show… on television he would simply sit at a table, address the camera familiarly and directly, and talk you through the making of a model, step-by-step. He made it sound easy. Watching Harbin I think I realized that paper folding was in some profound way about making things smaller and simpler, and as a teenager I perhaps had the sense, like a lot of teenagers, that I myself wished to be smaller and simpler, to be able to disappear almost, to enfold and enclose myself and to become something different, and of the essence. Unfortunately … there was no actual origami paper to be had in Essex in the 1970s. … My father would occasionally smuggle some A4 sheets home from work, and I would cut these down into squares, but it was too thick and too white to be able to make satisfactory models. I eventually found that carbon paper was much better for folding, except that it left your hands blue-black; so throughout the mid-1970s I fought a long and lonely battle with paper, attempting to fold mucky, flimsy dolphins, and birds, and dogs, and weird little pointless boxes. I never could do Harbin’s turtle.
My teenage origami years were about a decade after these three writers, so I don’t remember Robert Harbin (or any kind of origami) being on TV.
I do recall the difficulty of buying Japanese origami paper, and being underwhelmed by Maxfield’s famous origami paper: too crispy for my taste. I also used paper from my parents’ former business (white letterhead with ‘Rice Bowl’ in red oriental brushwork type: also a bit too thick). Dave Brill’s tip of using WH Smiths’ Expressions memo paper helped, as did overhearing a recommendation of Muji (behind Liberty’s) at a London mini-meeting.
The 1960s and 1970s seemed to be the golden age of the post-war origami boom, but by the 1980s origami seemed as relevant and as fashionable as flares, wide collars and kipper ties. I wrote to Dave Brill not quite believing that the British Origami Society still existed, but it did, as did some excellent books which reflected a healthy international scene.
I enjoyed my first few issues of “British Origami”, but without the remarkable fervour of Don Paterson. Eric Kenneway’s work was sensitively appreciated by Dave Brill, and Kenneway’s “Complete Origami” was the best compendium of information about paperfolding at the time. Francis Ow’s work influenced me (I had reinvented the Sonobe/Fuse/Kasahara unit from his 120° unit) as did Kunihiko Kasahara’s excellent books “Origami Omnibus” and “Origami for the Connoisseur”. I instinctively knew that modular origami was more efficient, effective and elegant than cutting and glueing nets from card or folding a single sheet of paper to make a polyhedron.
Unknown to me, the First International meeting of Origami Science and Technology in 1989 was the beginning of a new age of interest from mathematicians, engineers, scientist and educators. Origami would become respectable and be applied to almost anything to make it interesting, sophisticated and clever – and even appear in writings by literary types (even if they are all middle-aged men).
Perhaps today’s teenagers will also write these kind of memoirs in the 2060s (or make some kind of recreation in hyper-virtual reality): the first crude YouTube videos, the awkward interactions on Discord, the quest for double tissue and how in those days, they didn’t have – well, we can barely imagine what the future may bring.
Notes
1 Donald Paterson OBE FRSE FRSL (born 1963 in Dundee) is a Scottish poet, writer and musician.
2 David Nicholls (born 30 November 1966) is a British novelist and screenwriter.
3 Ian Edward Sansom (born 3 December 1966 in Essex, England) is the author of the Mobile Library Mystery Series.