Marbled Paper Guestbook
Marbled Paper Guestbook
Giulio Giannini
The cover is the paper Giulio Giannini e Figlio are known for - hand-marbled, drawn off a size bath in the bottega, each sheet pulled once and set aside. The pattern cannot be repeated. Two books in the same colourway will not be the same.
Inside, the pages are printed on ivory, lined and ready. There are eighty sheets, which is enough for years of names, dates, and the occasional longer note that somebody leaves when they mean it.
A guest book is an unusual object: other people fill it, slowly, over time, and you keep it. This cover will still be worth looking at when the last page is turned.
Several marbled colourways. Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
26x21x2cm
Lined ivory coloured paper
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.
