A Short History of Endpapers
The two pages nobody reads have done more to define the character of a book than the thousand pages between them. A field guide to the front matter.
The endpaper is the page you meet before the book begins. It is glued to the inside of the cover on one side and floats free on the other, and it exists for a small, unglamorous, load-bearing reason: to hide the join between the textblock and the boards. Without it, you would see the raw edge of the cloth, the exposed spine cords, the woodworking of the object. The endpaper is the book's inside pocket.
Marbled: Turkey, the 15th century
The earliest decorative endpapers we have are marbled, and they come out of Ottoman workshops in the fifteenth century — ebru, the art of floating pigments on a tray of thickened water and lifting the pattern off onto a sheet. Each one is unrepeatable. When these papers reached Venice in the 1550s along the trade routes, European binders adopted them almost immediately, and for the next three hundred years a good library was, among other things, a catalogue of marbling styles: Stormont, Spanish wave, French curl, nonpareil, peacock.
The endpaper is the book's inside pocket. Small, private, load-bearing, and almost always the first thing a binder decides.
Paste paper: Germany, the 18th century
In the Herrnhut community of Moravian binders in eastern Germany, from around 1750, an alternative developed: paste papers, made by brushing pigmented wheat paste onto a sheet and then combing, stamping, or fingerprinting a pattern into the wet surface before it dried. Paste papers were domestic — they could be made in a kitchen — and they gave the eighteenth-century binder a range of textures that marbling could not: coarse, matte, painterly, deliberately imperfect.
Solid: everywhere, the 20th century
The twentieth century mostly gave up. Endpapers became a single solid color — often black, often a bruised industrial blue — printed on the cheapest stock the binding line could accept. There are exceptions: the Everyman's Library series, the early Penguins with their marbled Cockerell endpapers, the Folio Society. But the trend was toward invisibility, and by the 1980s most trade hardcovers had endpapers you could not describe from memory ten seconds after closing the book.
We make our own paste papers on Thursday mornings, in a small back room off the sewing bench, using a recipe that has drifted a long way from the Herrnhut original: rye flour, cold water, one part gouache to four parts paste, combed with a rubber squeegee we cut ourselves. No two sheets are the same, which is either the point or the problem, depending on the customer. Most of the time it is the point.