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LEARNING TO MARBLE The Roedde Printing and Marbling Gallery
M y Grandfather Roedde was very young when he began to apprentice. To apprentice means to go to work with a specialist and learn a trade. His specialty was book binding, and he spent the time from when he was fourteen until he was eighteen apprenticing with a book binder. Just imagine already working every day at that age; you would no longer be in school.Book binding today is very different than book binding years ago. The books bound by my grandfather were bound in leather. Some had very special features like gold on the pages. Sometimes they had quite fancy lettering. Today when you print up a book, it is all done by computer. Years ago, all those letters would have to be set by hand. It was a very laborious job. Grandfather and Grandmother lived in the United States before they moved to Vancouver, B.C.. They were living in San Francisco when my Grandfather got a job in a book binding company, doing something called marbling. It's an art technique done in the inside of books and that was his specialty. He continued practicing this technique when he established Vancouver's very first book binding business.
Have you ever looked at a real piece of marble rock? Look at how the real marble has subtle lines of colour, flowing throughout the rock.
Marbling is a technique that creates those same swirls of colour, only on paper. These marbled papers used to be the special end papers of a book. My Grandfather would first bind the book in leather or another material, then make the marble paper that went on the inside cover. Here is a gallery of some of my Grandfather's binding, printing and marbling work. You may click on any of these images to go to a larger picture.
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