Notebook: Block Print
Notebook: Block Print
Giulio Giannini
The paper on these covers is block-printed by hand, the way Italy decorated its upholstery and its humbler rooms from the sixteenth century on. The motif is cut into a woodblock; each colour needs a block of its own; and because the blocks are small, the pattern is built across the sheet one press at a time, repeated until it is whole. Giulio Giannini e Figlio's own workshop is part of why the craft carried on into twentieth-century Italy.
The patterns are not decoration in the abstract - each is a folk motif from a particular Italian region, known by name, the kind of design Giannini have catalogued and published. Here, one of them wraps a soft-covered notebook of plain pages.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Plain book 12x17x2cm
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.
