Notebook: Leather and Marbled Paper
Notebook: Leather and Marbled Paper
Giulio Giannini
This is a half-bound book - the old bookbinder's construction, leather at the spine and corners where a book takes its wear, marbled paper across the boards where it does not. Giulio Giannini e Figlio make both parts themselves: the leather worked in Florence, the marbled paper drawn by hand off the bath. The cover is two of the bottega's crafts on a single object.
Inside, the pages are ivory and hand-sewn - gathered into sections and stitched, the way books were bound before glue. It opens flat, and it will stay sound for a very long time.
Available only in marbled-paper variations, no two the same.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Medium 15 x 21cm
Small 9 x 13cm
Plain ivory coloured paper inside
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.
