At the recent Sheffield maxi-meeting in Wentworth Castle, Dave Venables kindly brought a small selection from the BOS library archives for us to enjoy. Part of this was written communications from the late Philip Shen. As a huge fan of his work, I found these utterly enthralling!

One real gem was a letter from Jack Skillman to Shen, with hand-drawn diagrams and folded examples of his new invention, the legendary Jackstone! It was amazing to be actually handling pages from the history of origami. I can’t begin to imagine what other treasures are filed away in the BOS archives. If only someone would gift us enough money to create a properly funded and staffed resource for this extraordinary collection.