tête-bêche

1. not comparablehobbiesOf a postage stamp, printed upside down relative to the following stamp of the same row or column.

   Liu himself is a professional stamp collector, and in 1972 he bought a tête-bêche pair of Qing dynasty stamps from an auction in London.

   2017, David Der-wei Wang, A New Literary History of Modern China, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, page 704

plural tête-bêches

1. mediaA book where 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.

   It's an odd little confection, the tête-bêche, but it's oddly pleasing. Each author gets a fair crack of the whip, with their own cover and top-billing, and the illusion of two separate books makes a head-to-tail volume seem somehow to be good value.

   2011 July 28, David Barnett, “Tête-bêche books make a speculative return”, in The Guardian