Dos-à-dos binding
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- See also: dos-à-dos
Dos-à-dos binding is a form of book-binding in which two separate works are bound together back to back, with each upside down relative to the other. Books bound in this way thus have no back cover, but have two front covers. When a reader reaches the end of the text of one of the works, the next page is the (upside-down) last page of the other work. Thus, as opposed to other volumes with more than one novel, there's no way you can say which book is "first" or "last", since it depends on which end you start reading from.
The dos-à-dos format has been used for devotional books since the nineteenth century, and possibly earlier. It has also been used for secular works -- for example Irvin S. Cobb's Oh! Well! You Know How Women Are! bound dos-à-dos with Mary Roberts Rinehart's Isn't That Just Like a Man!, was published by George Doran in 1920.[1] The format became much more widely known in the 1950s, when Ace Books began to publish its Ace Doubles. This was a line of dos-à-dos genre paperbacks that ran from 1952 until the early 1970s. The Ace Doubles sold well and were widely regarded as innovative at the time: the October 18, 1952 issue of Publishers Weekly notes (wrongly) that Ace was the first publisher to put different authors in the same volume in dos-à-dos format.[2]
Dos-à-dos is French for "back to back", but the use of the term for binding is perhaps an English one: the authentic French term for binding in this way is une reliure jumelle.[3]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Copy description located in second-hand bookstore Robert Wright Books. Retrieved on 9 May 2006.
- ^ Publishers Weekly comment cited by James A. Corrick, Double Your Pleasure: The ACE SF Double (New York: Gryphon Books, 1989; ISBN 0-936071-13-3), p. 6.
- ^ John Carter, ABC for Book Collectors 5th ed (New York: Knopf, 1981; ISBN 0-394-41403-9), s.v. "Dos-à-dos binding."
