Leather Notebook: Caravaggio
Leather Notebook: Caravaggio
Giulio Giannini
Giulio Giannini e Figlio have been binding books in leather since 1856, and the Caravaggio is that craft at its plainest and most useful. The cover is soft, natural-tanned Florentine leather, wrapped around the pages and held shut by a leather tie - no clasp, no hardware, just the wrap and the knot. A pencil sits in the tie, where the binder meant it to.
Inside, ivory paper - the warm, soft white that bookbinders have always preferred to bright white. The leather is left close to raw: it carries its grain now, and it will carry the marks of being handled and used later.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Plain book cm 17x24x2
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.
