In its earliest days, in second- century-BC China, paper was an alternative surface for writing and art. In the West during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the producers of books recognized paper as a more abundant, more malleable, and cheaper substance for writing and printing than vellum and parchment. In terms of bookbinding applications, Michèle V. Cloonan notes, "The history of paper-covered books begins with the fifteenth century. The earliest known specimen, dated 1482, is a paper woodcut wrapper from Augsburg, where at least five were made."1 Eventually by the seventeenth century bookbinders recognized the possibilities of paper as an excellent substitute for animal skin. A leather-bound edition of 400 copies of a quarto or octavo book required 100 pelts—a costly proposition. Binders wanted a cheaper material that would be as attractive and protective as leather. Following up on their innovation of paper case bindings, bookbinders in Augsburg, Germany were the first to come up with a perfect substitution: paper that was decorated in the manner of leather.2 Binders made the paper sturdy and flexible and adorned it using economical methods. "Decorated paper was often meant to look expensive, and the material best suited to this is gold and, to a lesser extent, silver and bronze."3 So while publishers saved money by using paper, they were not necessarily giving up the expensive look of leather. One example of a paper made to look like a stamped leather binding is called "bronze-varnish paper" (Bronzefirnispapier in German), made with gold-colored pigment in many patterns over a decorated paper (usually adorned with colored paste). The leather papers emanated at first from southern Germany, particularly Augsburg. Later on, after about 1720, they were produced in Nuremberg, Fürth, Nördlingen, and Leipzig.4 Henk Voorn, the great Dutch paper historian, claims that the first such papers were made in 1690, "…when Jeremias Neuhofer experimented in Augsburg with the printing of cotton with a varnish mixed with bronze powder. Neuhofer worked together with Jacob Enderlin, an engraver from Isny. Eventually, Enderlin made himself independent from Neuhofer and shortly before 1700, was the first to start production of goldbronze- \[sic\] and silverbronze papers, i.e., paper printed with bronze-varnish from the raised surfaces of wooden printing-blocks."5 Also in 1690 Abraham Mieser "was one of the first in Europe to produce goldand silvercoated papers," explains Voorn, "by using a press for copperplate engravings to cover paper with thin sheets of gold leaf or silver leaf," and in the same year "great progress was made in the art of embossing with imitation gold leaf."6 The embossed paper is true Dutch gilt paper. From a distance the bronze-varnish papers may look like Dutch gilts, but upon close examination, one can see that the varnished papers are not three-dimensional, and that the metallic pigment in the varnished sheets is adhered on top, perhaps with the paste that they are printed over. True Dutch gilt paper has a stamped, embossed surface. In German, Dutch gilt paper is called Brokatpapier, which translates into English as brocade paper.7 These papers are quite distinctive. They are usually colored with a blotted-, brushed-, or stenciled-on paste in any of a number of colors (green, carmine, yellow, blue, bluish violet, or orange, or sometimes a combination of colors). They are then stamped with a metallic foil, most often gold, in a variety of patterns. The metallic effects were achieved not with real gold, but with imitation gold leaf, made with brass; the silver leaf was often made from tin. Voorn says, "The silver-colored sheets which have survived are often in a bad state, the silver easily turning complete black."8 Sometimes brass was mixed with copper to give the final product a reddish or greenish cast. The common patterns include saints, flowers, trades, stylized fruits and vegetables, arabesques, geometrics, soldiers, children's games, hunting scenes, tendrils, and designs that include flora and fauna. My wife and I have amassed a representative collection of Dutch gilt papers including a few unusual sheets that are stamped in gold but with no paste underwash: the metallic pigment is stamped directly onto an uncolored sheet. Voorn points out that the artists were often anonymous, but the ateliers in which these papers were produced sometimes stamped their names onto the edges of the sheet, in the original metal or wooden plate. Studios included Georg Christoph Stoy, Abraham Mieser (or Meser) and his son Leopold, Simon Haichele, Georg Popp, Johann Carl Munck and Johann Michael Munck, Johann Wilhelm Meyer, and many others. When the sheets are not stamped with the atelier name, it is difficult to assign a paper to a particular artist or atelier. "The patterns were often imitated by competitors," states Voorn. "Used plates were sometimes sold to other manufacturers, who obliterated the name of the original owner and eventually put their own name somewhere in the border. The independent designers and engravers often sold nearly identical designs or plates to various publishers.9 The ingenuity of the artists was vast. There are hundreds of patterns. The great number of surviving models has wound up on books, notably dissertations and almanacs, but there are also blank pamphlets that were used for school notes or scientific treatises. Though these papers were used into the early nineteenth century, they seem to have been manufactured only to the very end of the eighteenth century. In our collection we have an early Dutch gilt paper—from the eighteenth century—over a manuscript pamphlet dated 1824. It is difficult to date these papers since they were used sometimes decades after they were produced. In the nineteenth century, with great leaps forward in ink making, printing, and illustrating techniques, paper manufacturers produced papers that were simply printed with metallic inks. Some of them may look like Dutch gilt or bronze-varnish papers, but the effect is completely different. They are clearly inexpensive papers cheaply printed. Since mechanized papermaking did not hit the world until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all of the true Dutch gilts were made on handmade papers, and the three-dimensional effect of the stamping is distinctive and beautiful. When I show these papers to our guests, there is always an ahhh or an ohhh. When I show them the later nineteenth-century copies, there is no reaction whatsoever. By 1820 a binding cloth was invented that could withstand the rigors of folding and opening, could be manipulated easily over boards, and could be stamped in gold and many other colors. It became the material of choice for publishers, who were now producing books by the thousands on high-speed presses. The handmade Dutch gilt sheets could not be made in sufficient amounts to keep up with the vastly growing publishing industry and the cloths could be made quite beautiful with all kinds of decoration. This is a close-up of a beautiful floral pattern on an eighteenth-century Dutch gilt paper done by Johann Wilhelm Meyer in Augsburg, Germany. While it was common to stamp a paste paper sheet, this one is stamped over a blank, plain sheet of paper. 16 - hand papermaking The demand quickly disappeared for Dutch gilt paper, and its production ended by about 1800 in Europe. Oddly enough, it was Japanese papermakers who maintained production of imitation leather paper. Kinkarakawakami ("leather paper" in Japanese; also known as kinkarakami) was originally developed in seventeenthcentury Japan to emulate European gilt leather. By the nineteenth century, Europeans imported kinkarakawakami to replace crumbling leather wall coverings that were installed in civic buildings and palaces throughout Europe during the Renaissance and up through the nineteenth century. These architectural panels were richly gilded and embossed with many patterns. Acidic pollutants created by the Industrial Revolution befouled the air in many cities, causing deterioration of the leather wall coverings. In my travels, I have seen walls in Europe, particularly in Germany, covered in rather shabby, flaking leather panels. Used in place of leather panels, kinkarakawakami has the look, feel, color, and three-dimensionality of the original leather, and the kozo fibers are more stable than leather—the perfect substitute. The Daiwa Foundation Japan House mounted an exhibition in 2007 on kinkarakawakami and explains that leather paper "had its debut at the London International Exhibition of 1862, and soon architects and designers such as William Burges, Edward William Godwin and Christopher Dresser were using it."10 Today Ueda Takashi makes kinkarakami in Tokyo at his Kinkarakami Institute, which he founded in 1985.11 The material, manufactured in several patterns, is beautiful and so much like leather you expect it to moo. Despite the abrupt cessation of the manufacture of the original Dutch gilt paper over 200 years ago, Dutch gilts still enjoy great popularity. A good deal of scholarship is still being done on them, and Dutch gilt papers continue to be sought after by collectors, including this author.12 _________ notes 1. Michèle V. Cloonan, Early Bindings in Paper (London: Mansell, 1991), 5. 2. See Albert Haemmerle, Buntpapier: Herkommen Geschichte Techniken, Beziehungen zur Kunst (Munich: Verlag Georg D.W. Callwey, 1977, second edition), 22; and Richard J. Wolfe, Marbled Paper: Its History, Techniques, and Patterns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 20. 3. Decorated Paper Designs, 1800 (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1997), 169. No author is cited. 4. Wolfe, 22–23. 5. Henk Voorn, "The Dutch Gilt Papers in the Collection of the Royal Library in the Hague," IPH Yearbook 6 (1986): 155–60. This article has a good description of the printing plates and the method of production of these papers. While most of the papers were made in Germany, Voorn states that there were a few made in England or Utrecht. 6. Voorn, 155–56. 7. Henk J. Porck mentions that they are sometimes called "gold-embossed papers." See his "Characterization of Western Handmade Decorated Paper: Development of a Standard Terminology," in Looking at Paper: Evidence & Interpretation, symposium proceedings, Toronto, 1999 (Ottawa, Canada: Canadian Conservation Institute, 2001), 200. The term "brocade paper" apparently comes from the fact that the papers were meant to look like cloth, and the production of this paper was probably the first serious attempt to use a textile printing technique for the decoration of paper. See also Decorated Paper Designs, 1800, 169. 8. Voorn, 159. 9. Voorn, 158. The papers were imported into America in the eighteenth century. Lawrence C. Wroth mentions their use by the American printer John Peter Zenger in 1735 in the binding of the Charter of the City of New York; for a volume titled Catechism of Nature for the Use of Children from 1799; and several titles printed by Isaiah Thomas. Wroth says, "The colonial book buyer occasionally had his eyes gratified by a successful attempt at decoration, even in the case of cheaper volumes of which the covers were intended purely for protective purposes." See Wroth, The Colonial Printer (Charlottesville, VA: Dominion Books, The University Press of Virginia, 1938, reprinted 1964), 203. 10. Webpage for the exhibition, "Kinkarakami: Takashi Ueda and the art of Japanese leather paper," on Daiwa Foundation Japan House's website, http://www .dajf.org.uk/event_page.asp?Section=Eventssec&ID=253 (accessed May 10, 2009). 11. Editor's note: For more on Ueda Takashi, see Moriki Kayoko's article in this issue. 12. Please contact me if you have Dutch gilt paper specimens, Sidney_Berger@ pem.org.