I started wondering if French flaps were invented in France, and if they weren’t — which is what I assume to be the case — why they got to be called French flaps.

I suspect this is one of these unruly wild geese which we can chase to exhaustion, and that at the end we’ll find there’s no real evidence for preferring one origin myth over another, rather like prefect bound. (See also the comments on the Perfect binding post.)

In the end I come down on the side of French fold as the origin of French flaps: but a misuse of the term rather than the real meaning. A real French fold is printed on only one side and folded into 4 panels. It is often used in invitations or greeting cards. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this to be called a French fold rather than a Welsh, an Argentinian, a Thai one — people often grasp for the French as a sophisticated sounding appellation (and often of course as an insulting one, as in disease, leave, letter, loving; which for tit-for-tat’s sake are labelled as Anglais by French speakers).

The label “French fold book” appears to have evolved to mean something like this, where there are obviously no French folds involved — a French fold would demand that the top bolt was also left untrimmed, which would make any binding impossible to open. A seemingly knowledgable source says that such a binding style should really be called Japanese stab binding or French binding — though I was always familiar with French binding as a sewing term involving covering the raw edges of a bit of fabric with a ribbon or bias binding folded over the raw edge and sewn through. But again, why French? As far as I can see from this time-lapse video of a Japanese stab binding, there’s no inherent need for the uncut fore-edge element to be involved in this binding style. But of course if “everyone” is referring to a book like the one illustrated with uncut fore-edges and a stabbed spine binding as a French fold binding, then French fold binding it rapidly becomes. Maybe whoever came up with the idea of a French flap cover had recently seen one of these, and figured that the uncut fore-edge was what “French” was all about.

My habitual source of all knowledge on word origins, The Oxford English Dictionary is silent on the subject of French binding, French folds or French flaps. They even give the go-by to French joint which OUP tells us via their 2-volume Oxford Companion to the Book is a joint slightly wider than normal to allow a thick or heavy book to open more easily. Ingenious folk those French.

Later: On the subject of French . . . compounds here’s a delivery from yesterday: