The Mysterious Marbler

Item Details

New Castle, DE, Oak Knoll Books, 2009, Gilt-titled black cloth spine, the marbled paper over boards

SECOND REPRINTING, of 300 total copies (250 for sale), Very Good

New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2009.

8vo. 8 1/8 x 5 1/2 inches.  131 pp. Title page with 2-color decorative border, wood engraved illustrations from Jacob Abbott’s The Harper Establishment (New York 1855), 13 marbled paper samples mounted on so many pages, with a new Preface and “A Further Note on the English Marbling Tradition and on the Samples Illustrating this Reprinting” by Richard J. Wolfe which is added to this reprinting; text clean, unmarked. Gilt-titled black cloth spine, the marbled paper over boards is a facsimile of an original nineteenth-century English marbled paper; binding square and tight, minor bumping and a scratch to the boards. GD325-002ab. Else Fine. 

SECOND REPRINTING, of 300 total copies (250 for sale). First published 1854, the first reprint was issued by Bird & Bull Press in 1976. Reprinted with additional contents by Richard J. Wolfe by Oak Knoll Books in 2009. Richard Wolfe here reprints the scarce James Sumner pamphlet of 1854 because he felt that his skills as a paper marbler justified a new edition with improved marbled paper samples, and because of Wolfe’s greater knowledge of the art and craft of paper marbling gained over the intervening decades. James Sumer’s The Mysterious Marbler was the third British marbling manual to appear in the nineteenth century; it was a slender pamphlet and is very scarce in the market in the twenty-first century. Wolfe, pp. 80-81.

REFERENCE: Wolfe, Marbled Paper: Its History, Techniques, and Patterns, passim. 67 copies OCLC.

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