Notebook: Marbled paper
Notebook: Marbled paper
Giulio Giannini
This is the paper Giulio Giannini e Figlio are known for, made into something you can carry. The soft cover is a sheet of marbled paper, each one drawn by hand off a bath thickened with seaweed - colour combed and feathered into the pattern, then lifted away in a single pass. No sheet can be made twice, so no two notebooks are the same: the green runs to copper in one, the blue scatters into hundreds of small bubbles in another.
Inside, the end-papers are a different hand process - block-printed in the bottega - and the pages are plain, for writing or drawing as you please. A pencil sits at the spine. The whole thing closes with a wrapped string.
Several marbled colourways, each one its own sheet.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Plain book 17x24x2cm
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.
