An Essay in the History of Gold-Tooled
Bindings by Herbert P. Horne
London 1894
Part 8
Other papers, made in the last century, bear designs of scroll work interspersed with figures,
beasts, and birds, printed in gold upon a green back-ground: they are of a very handsome
appearance; and are probably of German origin. In recent years, a great number of patterned
end-papers have been designed and printed from wood and zinc blocks in England; of which the
most inventive and beautiful is that designed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the volumes of his
poetry.
During the seventeenth century, the Italians contrived a peculiar arrangement of their
endpapers. In an example before me, the inside of the boards is covered with violet silk; the
book itself being bound in black morocco: either endpaper, next the silk, is ornamented on both
sides with a large pattern of a Venetian character, printed in gold and black upon a ground of
the same colour as the silk; and the fly-leaf, which follows, is of white paper. In other examples,
the end-papers, covering the boards, alone are colored, the fly-leaves being plain.
The marbling of papers is no doubt an inferior art to that of ornamenting them with designs in
stamp; and it is, moreover, an art fallen, deservedly, into disrepute, on account of the sordid,
commercial use, which has been, and is still, made of it: but, in capable hands, it has produced
effects in colour, which are of real beauty, and worthy of admiration. The process of the art, as it
is ordinarily practiced, may be found set forth, with great particularity, in a
little treatise, by C. W. Woolnough entitled: The Art of Marbling, as applied to book edges and
paper; the first edition of which was published in 1853, and the second, in J 88 I. In the opinion
of this writer, the earliest marbled papers date from the beginning of the seventeenth century:
these he believes to be Dutch, and certain (drawn and antique patterns with stormont and
other spots to be the most original.' La Caille, on the other hand, in his Histoire de l'lmprimerie,
Paris, 1689, attributes the invention to Mace Ruette, the French binder. But there is a passage
in the Sylva Sylvarum of Francis Bacon, published at London in 1627, [Century viii, 741.] which
seems to point to the true origin of the art. (The Turks,' he says, 'have a pretty art of
chamoletting of paper, which is not with us in use'; and adds a brief description of the method.
Although marbled paper was not made in this country, at the time at which Bacon wrote, it had
been used in Germany at the end of the previous century. The Album Amicorum of Joannes
Cellarius, of Nuremberg, preserved in the British Museum [Add. MS. 27, 579.], bearing the date
1599, contains nine leaves of marbled paper, which are probably the earliest dated examples
extant.