The Book of the Erinyes

One of the elements of the handmade Book of the Erinyes will be the use of marbled paper — sometimes on the outside cover, and sometimes on the endpapers/inside cover.

As with all the parts of the book, I’m determined to make it all myself, so I bought myself a copy of Techniques for Marbleizing Paper by Gabriele Grünebaum.

First I made an alum solution, using 6 teaspoons of Alum in 450ml of water. The alum solution works as a mordant — it fixes the marbling colours onto the surface of the paper. After bringing the solution to the boil then letting it cool, I sponged it liberally onto a number of sheets of paper then left them overnight to dry.

The next day I prepared the marbling size, using 6 teaspoons of Carragheen Moss Powder dissolved in 4 pints of hand-hot water, and left it to cool before starting some experiments, following the patterns in Gabriele Grünebaum’s book.

I decided to use Acrylic Inks — they don’t require any dispersing agent to be added for marbling, and the pigments are strong enough to retain a good strong colour even when spread across the surface of the size.  The ones I bought come with pipettes in the lids of the bottles, which made the process even easier.

I was fairly pleased with the results, but I’m obviously going to have to get a lot more practice to control the process.

Nonpareil pattern:

Nonpareil pattern:

Wavy Combed:

I’m happy to say that I’ve printed out the title and half-title pages.

On Wednesday at the Letterpress workshop I monopolised the press to run off 30 copies of each (I’ve finalised the limited edition to 30 copies).

Due to the nature of Letterpress there are slight variations between each one — differing amounts and distributions of ink because of how I inked the text on each pass.  This is one of the things I really like about Letterpress.

Next up will be the Contents page (which I’ve already set, and is waiting in a galley) and the first actual page of the book.