Tag Archive: 0decorated papers

I blogged last year about the idea of books being ‘fashionably orange’. Here’s another example: This is a copy of the first edition of Die natürliche Tochter, the last of Goethe’s three verse dramas in the classical style, which had received its premiere, in Weimar, in April 1803. This copy is in the original orange […]

This is a copy of the first edition of Il parnaso veneziano (1796): a poem in praise of Venice and its poets by the Jesuit polymath Saverio Bettinelli (1718–1808), with a long essay ‘Della cultura della poesia presso li veneziani’ by Jacopo Morelli (1745–1819), the great librarian of St Mark’s. It is also a nice […]

In my last blogpost, I wrote about a Victorian binding which sought to imitate polished walnut. This week, I wanted share another paper, one from earlier in the nineteenth century, and from Germany, which was also used to mimic burr wood veneers or, on books, tree calf. It’s called Wurzelmarmorpapier (lit. ‘root marbled paper’) and […]

This book, a first edition of Recherches pratiques sur les différentes manieres de traiter les maladies vénériennes (1770) by Jacques-Joseph de Gardane (1726–1786), docteur-régent at the University of Paris, exhibits something called a cut-flush binding.  As the online Language of Bindings Thesaurus explains, in such a binding ‘the boards and/or covering material are cut level […]

Last week, We Love Endpapers, the Facebook group I set up (now with over 7000 members!), turned six. To celebrate, I decided to put together a short list featuring various types of historic decorated paper (marbled, sprinkled, bronze-varnish, brocade, block-printed, and paste). One particularly interesting type is Carta di Varese. Perhaps the most famous Italian […]

Paste paper (Kleisterpapier in German) is a type of decorated paper in which coloured paste is brushed onto paper and then manipulated in some way before allowing to dry.  It was especially popular, particularly in northern and eastern Germany, in the second half of the eighteenth century (although the technique itself had already been around […]