Paper Marbling, all the tips and tricks of 20 years marbling paper (including book edge marbling)

 My "Eureka" moment came when I realized that successful marbling consisted of a union of the opposites, still it took me a lot of painstaking experiment before the process became fluid and predictable. This tutorial contains everything you need to know to get good results, having said that, it is a wayward art and a lot will depend on your local conditions, temperature, humidity, water etc. But it's all here. If you feel that you might be suffering from the particular illness that causes people to want to marble paper then this tutorial will give you many shortcuts to success. I used to use ox gall, I made my own, which meant trips to the slaughterhouse to collect the gall bladders of freshly slaughtered cattle, I neither enjoyed the trips nor the method of extracting and processing the gall, it came as a great relief when I found a household substitute for it...this and many other tips are contained in the tutorial. Included is the best source of fresh carrageen moss I have found, plus an online source of Alum, a description of how to make some of the more esoteric combs used in marbling, how to produce the Spanish Wave marble ( examples shown below) and a section on book edge marbling. To marble the edges of books and produce matching end-papers you only need a small tray and little equipment, a bindery could do a lot worse than learn this skill, it gave us an edge as binders, as I have said, very few binders still do it and it cannot be convincingly faked.

As always I can be contacted by email if you have problems ...which you probably will. Marbling has been one of the most difficult skills to master, but the satisfaction to be had is exceptional.

Below you can see some examples of a design known as the Spanish Wave, surely some of the most beautiful patterns to be obtained by marbling.

Here are some pictures of the process's involved.

      The techniques behind book edge marbling.

You are welcome to download this manual by clicking the image below.