Standalone volvelles became popular in the early 20th century, and were made for seemingly everything: scientific data, geographical and political data, military data, medical data, sports data, cooking data — all kinds of things. Here is a fortune-telling one from 1935. You turn the disc until the question you wish to have answered appears in the crystal ball, then you randomly point to one of the playing cards, and subtract its value from the number to the right of the question; the result is the chapter number you turn to in the accompanying book. You look up the value of the card you selected in that chapter, to read you answer.
There are countless ways you could vary this basic scheme, and if you built the volvelle into the front cover of the book, you could make some really cool divination tool-books.
[photo is reproduced from Jessica Helfland’s Reinventing the Wheel]
Hi HyperRitual,
excellent presentation so far. I think that the figure from Matthew Reinhart & Robert Sabuda’s Encyclopaedia Mythologica volume, Dragons & Monsters, is the Medusa and not the Sphinx. I’m not 100% certain about this, but I can deduct it from her snakey hair.
Keep up with the great work,
Plethon.
Hi, Nick. Thanks for taking time to check out my work. Look at the lower-right corner of the book; that is the transition I am referring to in the speech/text. :-)
Right, I get it now, thank you for pointing it out. I have finished watching the slide show and I find it brilliant. It does motivate to go out and start doing, creating, interacting… Please produce more work like this, we’re so thirsty for this kind of quality.
Cheers, man!