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Recent Publications JAMES N. GREEN, BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Rare Books & Manuscripts Librarianship reviews books, annual reports, new periodicals, and occasional book and auction catalogues pertaining directly and indirectly to the fields of rare books librarianship, manuscript curatorship, and archives management. Publishers, librarians, and archivists are asked to send appro· priate publications for review or notice to the book review editor. Books are occasionally received which are not strictly witin the limited scope chosen for this Book Review section, but which might nevertheless be of interest to readers of RBML. In future issues such books will be noted as Books Received, whenever the list grows long enough to warrant publication. Books or publication announcements should be sent to the book review editor: James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107-5698; (215) 546-3181. REVIEWS seeped away from Philadelphia. One wag Wolfe, Richard J, Marbled Paper: Its suggested the large number of slides History, Techniques, and Pattems with intentionally prOvided cover under which Special Reference to the Relationship those with trains to catch could slip away of Marbling to Bookbinding in Europe in relative obSCUrity. Some who attended and the Western World. Philadelphia: the lectures may therefore doubtitpossible, The University of Pennsylvania Press, but this monumental book expands as 1990. 245p. $95.00. ISBN 0-8122-8188- well as records Wolfe's lectures. 8. Monumental it is: 192 double-column As Richard J. Wolfe's 1981 A.S.W. pages, almost nine inches by twelve, follow Rosenbach Fellowship lectures prog a brief preface and acknowledgements. ressed, word of their length and denSity The text, in tum, is followed by 35 pages James N. Green is Curator of Printed Books at the Library Company of Philadelphia. 105 106 RARE BOOKS & MANUSCRIPTS LIBRARIANSHIP of notes and 17 of index. On the order of is a large bit of color here, another splash a quarter million words, all told. Not there, but the pattern fails to cohere. included in the page count are 46 pages The first book is a history of marbling of color plates and their captions, some as a craft industry in Europe and America; 350 images total. One 18-page section Far Eastern marbling is discussed briefly alone reproduces 192 "ofthe most common in the early chapters but not followed up marbled patterns'-though Wolfe elsewhere. This book is difficult because apolOgizes that even these "can never be sources, documentary and otherwise, are enough to serve as more than a mere scant, but Wolfe produces an always closely outline or guide to the most common reasoned, frequently compelling, account patterns produced in Europe and America of practices at particular places and in during the first four centuries when this particular periods. art came to be practiced in the West" (p. The second book is an extended 179). Another 80 or so black-and-white bibliographie commentary on the Western illustrations enhance the text. Marbled literature of marbling. This bookis difficult Paper is an astonishing accumulation of because the sources are intertwined with knowledge and experience, gracefully bookbinding literature; are typically, often designed, carefully proofread, I crisply intentionally, quite abbreviated printed, Smythe sewn, sturdily cased, deSCriptions of a complicated craft; and attractively dustjacketed in a reproduction because the development ofmore preCisely of a marble ofWolfe's own manufacture. deSCriptive scientific language leaves their In spite of its size it is a pleasure to handle meaning no longer at all obvious. With and to look at. his earlier writing and experimental Richard Wolfe has no peer in his marbling, however, Wolfe has made major combined knowledge of marbling history contributions to recovering these texts and of marbling technique, the one simply finding them in one of their few expertise constantly reinforcing the other, remaining copies, translating them, and as a rare book librarian he has had reprinting them, forCing them to yield ample opportunity to examine thousands practical results-and those contributions of early marbles used as endsheets in are reviewed and extended here. books. These unique qualifications have The third book, somewhere between made this impressive book possible. scientific treatise and how-to-do-it manual, Unfortunately, Wolfe has not brought discusses the chemistry, phYSiCS, materials them smoothly into focus: he has produced and equipment of marbling. The fourth at least fourrelated books which intersect, book surveys the "evolution" of marbling overlap, and intertwine with great patterns. complexity-and no little redundancy. Linking all this together is a prejudice His work leaves the reader with an never directly stated. There are myriad impression that no way resembles the ways ofputting patterned colors on paper image of sharply distinct colors, however from painting to printing-and several intricately patterned, so characteristic of share the name marbling. One way is to the marbles Wolfe greatly admires-and create a size bath, float on it colors whose himself creates. It's rather more a muddle. position on the bath surface can be tightly Or, better, to modifY the metaphor: there controlled, manipulate those colors with RECENT PUBLICATIONS 107 simple tools to create arepeatable pattern, deep skeptiCism about the essential then transfer the pattern to paper; this is seriousness of the rather sizable number what Wolfe sometimes calls "classical of contemporary artists who have marbling."What interests Wolfe-I don't rediscovered the marbling process: they think it unfair to say all that interests do not exhibit, for him, the diSCipline Wolfe-is a single question: when forced by craft conditions. confronted with a piece of paper bearing Wolfe has set himself many goals, a classical marble Wolfe asks, "how can achieved many of them splendidly, and this pattern be recreated?" Wolfe is created a store of information that many certainly aware ofa tension here: a classical of us will gratefully return to again and marble is necessarily unique (no two again. It is therefore hard to account examples ofa pattern are preciselysimilar), responsibly for the feeling that something yet to interest him it must be part of a still has gone missing. This feeling is, family whose members are essentially the perhaps, most sharply felt at the point same. 2 And while the question is simple, that most ofus will most frequently consult answering it for now a 15th-century Turkish this book: what assistance does it provide sheet, now a 16th-century German sheet, with the deSCription of a particular marble? now a 19th-century British sheet, is far Is this a snail, a curl, a placard, a shell, a from easy. The answers are remarkably Stormont? Directly, sadly, the answer is varied; and that is one of the great quite uncertain, because Wolfe assumes challenges of marbling. we wish to know "what deSigns evolved in His prejudice allows Wolfe to put aside particular regions at given times" (page a great many matters. Oil marbling is 179), a distinctly more complex question, "actually a bastardized form of marbling, as Wolfe explains in considerable detail. for it does not allow control" (p. 135), and Marblers have created a relatively small gets short shrift (though the work of numberofbasicpattems---.somefewdozen Swedish marbler Ingeborg Borjesson or less from the evidence of Wolfe's merits grudging approval). Artists index"-but each pattern can be varied in concerned to exploit uniqueness of image a much larger number of ways to produce interest Wolfe little: he never says directly a daunting number of sub-families and, but seems to believe that almost anyone in the end, an infinite number of unique can achieve an arresting design once: to examples. To what degree and in what repeat it at will, aye, there's the rub. ways must one example resemble another Consequently, while there is a longish to count as a family member? Abstractly recountingofnineteenth-centuryGerman considered, there seem only two ways to efforts to mechanize the process, Wolfe's create a taxonomy for what is, histOrically principal purpose is to demonstrate why considered, a mess: either sort a huge it was a fatally flawed project: nothing can number of examples by essential and replace the skilled craftsman's hands, eyes accidental features into nameable families and experience. Furthermore, his (patterns); or recover the process by which discussion of marbling in our century is the sheet was made (thereby establishing limited-the period when craft-made pattern and variation). The first is marbles were widely used in bookbinding problematic: no number of examples, had passed-and, such as it is, reflects a however large, is quite large enough, and 108 RARE BOOKS & MANUSCRIPTS LIBRARIANSHIP the criteria which define essential and century English manual) gives instructions accidental may collapse it into method on making it.' two. Method two, however, seems quite For many patterns, certainly, it would promising, and Wolfe's natural choice in be possible to relate illustration and process light of his hands-on marbling experience. more closely, at the cost of considerable In his concluding essay, however, Wolfe, work teasing strands of information from "after giving the matter serious thought," the text. Still, many of us will be tempted "elected to discuss and arrange the to continue to consult first the frontispiece following patterns by country and period" of Bernard Middleton's A History of (p. 179), thereby preserving the historical English Craft Bookbinding Technique' blur and partially retracing his earlier with its mere dozen less well-reproduced text. Though titled "The Evolution of but forthrightly labeled examples, then Marbled Patterns," Wolfe admits turn to Wolfe for nuances, modifications "'Progress' in marbling, as in most other and refinements aplenty. fields, has been marked by a continual Wolfe begins his preface, "The work search for cheaper and quicker methods" that follows is the outcome of research (p.