Marble and leather photo album
Marble and leather photo album
Giulio Giannini
This is the half-bound version of the album - leather at the spine and corners, the edges that take the handling, and Giannini's marbled paper across the boards. The marbling is the craft the bottega is best known for, drawn by hand off a seaweed bath one sheet at a time, so no two albums are covered alike. The spine carries raised bands: the cords the pages are sewn onto, left to show.
Inside, the leaves are ivory card, heavy enough to hold mounted photographs flat, with a sheet of tissue between each one so the images never sit face to face.
It is made to be filled slowly, and kept for a long time.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Landscape 30cm x 23cm x 5cm - 100 pages (50 sheets)
Portrait 24cm x 30cm x 5cm - 100 pages (50 sheets)
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.
