Читать книгу Thomas Berthelet, Royal Printer and Bookbinder to Henry VIII., King of England онлайн

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Innumerable also are the methods the Italian artists followed with regard to their management of gold leaf, or gold foil; sometimes a whole design is picked out with minute gold dots, sometimes backgrounds are flatly gilded all over, leaving the design on the leather, and sometimes the method of working closely resembles that followed at the present day. The early Venetian bookbinders, as well as some of the Oriental gilders, knew some way of gilding a line drawn on leather by means of a style. This is a difficult thing to do, but effective in competent hands; and if it could be done with any degree of safety, such a process would now open up an entirely new field for decorative bookbinders, who are at present much bound down by the limitations forced upon them in consequence of chiefly using set stamps specially cut for each curve and bend and detail. Of course such lines are easy to execute in blind, but it is when the gilding begins that the difficulties increase. The essential point in gold-tooling on leather, as we know it, consists in the fixation of gold leaf by means of albumen. The design is marked in blind on leather and painted over with glair of egg, the gold leaf then being carefully laid over it; the marks of the blind-tooling show clearly through the gold, and each of these impressions is steadily reimpressed with the same tools in the same places over the gold. The tools are heated to a point just sufficient to harden the albumen without burning the leather. If necessary, this process can be repeated again and again, until in the finest specimens of such work the gold looks as if wires of the solid burnished metal were actually inlaid on the leather. The albumen protected by the gold