INTRODUCTION

The term leporello refers to any printed material that is folded into an accordion-pleat, sometimes referred to as a concertina fold. It is a method of parallel folding with the folds alternating between front and back through peaks and valleys in the folded medium.

The name likely comes from the manservant, Leporello, in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Famed rogue and lover Don Giovanni (in Italian - also known as Don Juan in Spanish) has seduced so many women that when Leporello displays a tally of Giovanni's conquests, it unfolds, accordion-like, into a shockingly long list.

Ancient accordion-folded books have been found in many parts of Asia. In the Victorian era leporellos were commonly used as travel souvenirs, depicting panoramic landscape scenes of the places travelers had visited. Today, leporellos are an account of incidents or events – sometimes as extensive narratives which can be printed on both sides of the folded medium.

Variations of the leporello found on this exhibition include the vertical venetian-blind fold, and flutter books in which the text block can be gently pulled out from the spine to show multiple pages at once.

CURATORIAL NOTE

The curators have chosen books that specifically communicate their content through the structure of folded material. The fold allows for multiple readings and ways of negotiating one's way through the book's narrative(s). Most books on this exhibition are simple leporello fold-outs that present their narratives in a sequential manner. But some are printed on both sides of the substrate, gesturing to a circular narrative that has no formal start or end point. Other examples complicate the continuous folded substrate through cuts, internal folds and shaped pages. Such formal elements perplex the narratives, producing multiple / parallel readings, stories-within-stories and analogous visual elements. We acknowledge that in the curatorial process, the manner in which the individual cabinets hold and, in many instances, limit the expansive properties of the book, is telling. The JGCBA houses perhaps the world's longest uninterrupted book-arts vitrine (along the East wall) yet it is utterly inadequate for exhibiting Stephen Dupont's mammoth leporello-fold, double sided book titled Typhoon (2014). What leporello-fold books suggest is that their voices speak most coherently beyond the limits of what can be displayed.