#turkish pattern

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Marbled Monday

Today I am sharing The Life and Letters of Emory Upton: Colonel of the Fourth Regiment of Artillery, and Brevet Major-General, U.S. Army by Peter S. Michie and published by D. Appleton and Company in 1885. Upton was a general and military strategist in the U.S. Army, best known for his service in the Civil War. This book includes a biography of Upton and his letters. Its author, Peter Smith Michie, was an Army engineer in the Civil War and later became a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who wrote a well-known biography of General McClellan as well as books on things like analytical mechanics, hydrodynamics, and practical astronomy.

The binding is definitely not contemporary to the text, so we can assume that it at some point fell into disrepair and was rebound. The spine is dark green leather with gold stamping and the covers are marbled paper over boards. The marbling is a snail pattern done on a Turkish base. I really like the mix of colors used—purple, teal, red, white, and gold all swirl together to make a very colorful snail!

This is my last Marbled Monday post because this is my last week working at UWM Special Collections! I am sorry to leave but excited about the new opportunities my future holds. Thanks to everyone for exploring marbling with me over the past few years!

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

[winter-mornings]

Inktober day 10: pattern

All arabesques and flowers, gentle and delicate, as are your lips on mine

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Marbled Monday

Marbling reminiscent of river stones? Sure, why not?! This lovely blue, grey, and white marbling adorns the cover of Brief Lives, a book of poems by American poet and professor William Dickey (1928-1994) published in 1985. The poem shown here is the first poem in the book.

William Dickey was professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University and wrote 15 books over the span of his career. His partner Leonard Sanazaro was also a poet and teacher at City College of San Francisco, as well as a scholar on the work and life of Sylvia Plath. Dickey passed away in 1994 from HIV-related complications.

The marbling, book design, and printing were all done by letterpress printer and paper marbler Robin Heyeck at the Heyeck Press in Woodside, California. It is a stone or Turkish pattern printed on light grey laid stock with darker grey and light blue forming the pattern. To create this pattern, colors are simply dropped into the bath on top of one another—the new drops push the ones already in the bath away, creating the veining that mimics marble.

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-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

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Marbled Monday

This Marbled Monday we're sharing volume 5 from a ten volume set of The Plays of William Shakespeare with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators to Which Are Added Notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens with an Appendix. This edition was published in 1773. Volume 5 contains the plays King John, King Richard II, King Henry IV Part I and Part II.

The marbling is (I think) a Turkish pattern with black, yellow, red, and grey on a blue-green field. There is some really nice tooling around the inner edges of the binding as well as on the spine. It was really difficult to get a good image of the spine because the leather is so mottled and the gold is so delicate, but in the last picture shown here you can see the beautiful roses and designs stamped on it.

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-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

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Marbled Monday

This Marbled Monday we’ve got a real stunner for you—the marbled covers and end sheets of an 8 volume set of The Spectator, which was (according to Wikipedia) “a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England, lasting from 1711 to 1712. Each ‘paper,’ or ‘number,’ was approximately 2,500 words long, and the original run consisted of 555 numbers, beginning on 1 March 1711. These were collected into seven volumes. The paper was revived without the involvement of Steele in 1714, appearing thrice weekly for six months, and these papers when collected formed the eighth volume.” This edition was published in 1856 in Boston by Little, Brown, & Co. 

Each volume features a half binding in tan leather and marbled paper. The same marbled paper was also used at the end sheets for each volume. The marbling is a Turkish pattern, with burnt umber, tan, bright blue, teal blue, and white. There is also a lovely flower detail stamped in gold on the spine of each volume. 

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-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

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Marbled Monday

This fine Marbled Monday we’ve got this lovely green, yellow, and red marbled treat for you! The actual color of the book in daylight looks more like the first picture shown here, while the second close-up reads a little more grey than it appears in real life. 

The book is a facsimile of William Blake’s All Religions Are One published by the Trianon Press in London in 1970. Inside are teeny tiny actual size reproductions of Blake’s etchings, which were originally made in 1788. The etchings were not printed until 1795, however. These reproductions were made from ektachromes, a kind of Kodak film similar to Kodachrome. There are ten plates, each only a few centimeters wide, and accompanying text for each plate at the back of the book. It is thought that the black squares framing the etchings were added later. 

The marbling on the covers is dark green and light green/grey splotches with yellow and red veining throughout. This is an example of a Turkish pattern, one of the oldest marbling patterns, in which multiple colors are thrown on the bath using a marbling brush. The colors added later end up more dominant and cause the colors sprinkled on first to become like veining between the blobs of the later colors. 

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-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

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Fore Edge Friday

This week’s example for #Fore Edge Friday comes from our copy of British editor and Milton specialist William Aldis Wright‘s 1903 critical edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton printed by John and Charles Felix Clay for Cambridge University Press. It is bound in what is known as a prize binding, a finely-bound book given as a prize or award at European educational institutions. This tradition is known from at least the mid-17th century, and in England special prize bindings persisted until the mid-20th century. Prize editions are often bound in dark goatskin with raised bands, gold stamping and tooling, the cover stamped with the logo of the school, and the edges treated with gilding or, as in this case, marbling.

This particular prize binding was given to a student named C. A. Fletcher by England’s famed Charterhouse School, and the cover bears the school’s crest with its motto “Deo Dante Dedi” (God having given, I gave). The abbreviated text stamped in gold at the bottom of the spine, “Schol. Carthus,” makes reference to the school’s original early-17th-century founding on the site of an old Carthusian monastery. To this day pupils and alumni of Charterhouse are referred to as Carthusians. The edges on all three sides of the text block and on the endpapers have been marbled in what is called a Spanish pattern.

According to the University of Washington’s site on Patterned Papers, the pattern begins with a Turkish base, created by throwing colors “onto the surface of the bath using a marbling brush. The first colors thrown tend to constrict as other[s] follow and become the ‘vein’ colors for the latter thrown inks.” Then, as the paper is laid onto the bath, it is agitated back and forth in regular motions, repeatedly to create the rippling patterns that can be seen here most evidently in the endpapers. We think, however, that the edge marbling might just be the Turkish pattern. As we have mentioned before, when marbling the edges of a book, the text block is clamped tightly shut, and once dipped, the excess fluid is blown or shaken off quickly to prevent it from running into the book. Once dry, the marbled edges are burnished.  

The Washington site highlights an interesting legend about how this pattern originated:

The pattern was created at the beginning of the 17th century. Marbling lore has suggested . . . that it was discovered when a marbler's assistant who was nursing a hangover and had shaky hands, laid the paper into the bath (to pull up a finished paper) and as a consequence of the unsteady hands pulled a pattern with the linear, gradated lines characteristic of this pattern.

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