A few years ago, we lucked into our first printing press, a 1910 Chandler & Price letterpress. It’s a dream: 1000 lbs of cast iron, complete with ye olde foot treadle and curvy-spoked flywheel. The perfectly interlocking gears and movements mesmerize us, and its tactile impressions on paper elevates the experience of the simplest line or letter. Unexpectedly, our humble garage transformed into a place of experiment and play. As Anthony is a writer, animator, and illustrator, and Nif is a printmaker and bookbinder, the nascent Smashing Press emerged as a place where we could collaborate and ruminate on how structure and medium can expand the experience of a story.

Around the same time, we came across a small Japanese flyer for the British acid jazz band Jamiroquai. It looked like a single page, but you could unfold it to reveal a second page underneath, and then a third and a fourth. Once you reached the last page it continued to unfold, looping back to the beginning. It was like a cross between a business card and a magic trick. The interaction was so unexpected and immediately engaging, we wondered why we had not seen it used as a storytelling format.

After some research, we found the structure was called a flexagon, and is technically a paper polygon which changes its visible side or face when “flexed.” It was invented at Princeton University in 1939 by a mathematics graduate student who was idly folding off-cuts of paper. The variation we’ve been playing with was called a cross-flexagon. It’s a deceptively simple object to hold in your hands, and can contain a lot of surprises. We’ve found it’s an ideal format for telling a short illustrated story, because, you are literally unfolding the narrative as you read it.

The main limitation is its length — only four pages. Fortunately, Anthony has written a lot of flash fiction (very short stories) so this seemed like a perfect fit.