Paper Bindings

Paper marbling, one of the most common techniques for decorating paper, began in the East and migrated West, with practitioners setting up guilds in Europe in the sixteenth century. Marbled papers are most closely associated with bookbinding, as they were commonly used as endpapers and as wrappers for un-bound or yet-to-be-bound books. In addition to marbled patterns, papermakers devised other techniques of decoration, including pulled-paste papers, which have a three-dimensional quality, block-printed papers, cut papers, foiled papers and Dutch gilt papers that evoke the quality of brocade. The protection that paper wrappers from the early-modern period offered were flimsy when compared to board bindings from the same time, and survival of fine specimens of decorated paper wrappers has been more precarious. Patterned papers are still used to decorate the bindings of books, often pasted over the boards of a binding or used as endpapers.