The term "dos-à-dos" is also used to refer to a single volume in which two texts are bound together, with one text rotated 180° relative to the other, such that when one text runs head-to-tail, the other runs tail-to-head. However, this type of binding is properly termed
tête-bêche (/tɛtˈbɛʃ/) (from the French meaning "head-to-toe", literally referring to a type of bed). Books bound in this way have no back cover, but instead have two front covers and a single spine with two titles. 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. These volumes are also referred to as "upside-down books" or "reversible books". The tête-bêche format has been used for devotional books since the nineteenth century, and possibly earlier. It has also been used, for example, to bind two-way language dictionaries, and even for novels. An example is
The Loving Couple: His (and Her) Story, a 1956 novel by
Patrick Dennis. Here, the books are first-person accounts of a rocky marriage, one narrated by the husband, the other by the wife. The format became widely known in the 1950s, when
Ace Books began to publish its
Ace Doubles. This was a line of
tête-bêche genre paperbacks that ran from 1952 through the early 1970s. The Ace Doubles binding was considered innovative, if gimmicky, at the time; the 18 October 1952 issue of
Publishers Weekly describes it as a "trick format". More recently, the format was used for the 1990
Methuen paperback edition of ''
Monty Python's Flying Circus: Just the Words'', a two-volume collection of the scripts of the television series. The tête-bêche format has found use for bilingual publications, for example in
Canada and
Ireland. Canada has
two official languages which have equal status,
French and
English, while in Ireland
the official languages are Irish and English. The tête-bêche format offers a way of printing a document in both official languages without either being given priority. ==References==