'dos-à-dos' books

The ‘dos-à-dos’ (or back to back) process is a binding method found almost exclusively in the 16th and 17th centuries. The process uses a zigzag method of attaching two books inside of one. Its contents often show why this was done — in it, you’ll often find two complementary or devotional works, such as the Bible’s Old and New Testament. While reading one volume you can flip the book over to consult the other. It has seldom been seen for centuries, yet it found a revival in the 1950s through Double Ace books.

The ‘dos a dos’ or tête-bêche format has also been used in dual language dictionaries and some more recent 20th-century novels. An example is The Loving Couple, a 1956 work by Patrick Dennis. The book records two first-person accounts of an unsteady marriage, one narrated by the husband and, when turned over, the other by the wife. Using this same binding method, Volume One and Two ‘of Other’ are similarly presented as mirrored worlds, or as complementary others. Together they create a meandering line through our different modes of experiencing the world itself. Each Volume holds parallel realities of both our instincts and reasons, facts and feelings, or one and other. Ancient Chinese philosophy might call it Yin Yang, or the principle that all things exist as indivisible and contradictory opposites, where both sides contain parts of the other.

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