Block Printed paper sheet
Block Printed paper sheet
Giulio Giannini
This is block-printed paper sold as a sheet - the same craft that covers Giannini's notebooks and cards, here on its own.
The motifs are not generic. Each is drawn from Giulio Giannini e Figlio's own archive, the patterns the workshop has cut, kept, and printed since 1856 - a record of Italian decorative tradition held by one family, in one bottega. The block is inked and pressed by hand, a separate block for each colour; because the blocks are small, the pattern is built across the sheet one press at a time. The slight irregularities of that pressing are the evidence of the hand that made it.
Several patterns from the archive - for wrapping, for lining, for covering a book of your own.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
50 x 70 cm
Acid-free, so it will keep.
About Giulio Giannini & Figlio
Marbling is close to a thousand years old. It came west along trade routes, reached Europe through the Arab world, and by the nineteenth century had found a particular home in Florence. In 1856, Pietro Giannini opened a stationery and bookbinding bottega in Piazza Pitti, in the Oltrarno, a few steps from the Palazzo Pitti. It has been there ever since - long enough that you could visit Florence for years and still walk past it.
The craft has moved through the family without a break since: six generations of it. Maria Giannini runs the bottega now, alongside Guido Junior, the fifth generation - and the name, "e Figlio," still records an earlier Giulio and his son. The first Gianninis bound books for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In the generations since, the family has trained makers who went on to open workshops of their own, in Italy and beyond.
The marbled paper is made the old way, one sheet at a time. Colour is dropped onto a bath thickened with seaweed, combed and feathered into pattern, and lifted away in a single pass. No two sheets are the same; no sheet can be made twice. From that paper - and from Florentine leather - the bottega binds notebooks and photo albums, and hand block-prints its gift wrap, each piece finished by hand in the room behind the shop.
The marbled paper across The Leopard - the homepage, the identity - is theirs.
Giulio Giannini e Figlio is exclusive to Australia at The Leopard.
