Stone battal
The oldest page in the book: colour thrown and left unstirred, each drop shouldering the last into rings and crescents. Cuts generously for full endpapers.
№ S-01 · 48 × 66 cm£12 / sheet
№ 01 — The Tank
A working model of the marbler's tray — the same mathematics that move real ink on real size. Drop colour, draw the stylus through it, comb, then pull your sheet.
Mode
Inks
Bench
Drop gall — the pale ink — into a colour to open rings. Pulling the sheet lifts the ink from the size; the bath returns to rest.
Today's pulls
No sheets pulled yet — the bath is waiting.
№ 02 — The Papers
№ 03 — The Craft
I / IV
The size
Carrageenan — Irish moss, boiled and strained — thickens the water until it will carry pigment on its back. The bath rests overnight and is skimmed each morning with a strip of newsprint. It should pour like single cream.
II / IV
The colours
Earth and mineral pigments ground with ox-gall. The gall lowers each drop's surface tension so it spreads — and every new drop shoulders the older ones aside. The whole geometry of marbling begins in that little push.
III / IV
The comb
Brass pins set in beech, a different rake for every pattern: the nonpareil comb at a scant five millimetres, the wide feather comb, the single stylus for freehand veins. One pass, one direction, no second thoughts.
IV / IV
The pull
Alum-mordanted paper is laid down from the near edge in one unhurried roll, then pulled off with the whole pattern clinging to it. Rinsed, hung, pressed flat. What the paper takes, the bath forgets.
№ 04 — Commissions
Edition work, quietly done
We marble to order for binders, conservators and private presses: endpapers matched to a leather swatch, edition runs to two hundred sheets, edge-marbling for text blocks, and sympathetic repairs to papers older than this house. Send the book — or the idea of it.
bench@marmor-atelier.example — replies on Fridays