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Five acres, two little ones, one awesome husband, 12 ducks (give or take), and a bunch of fruit trees and garden beds. In her spare time, Nicole likes to knit, paint, draw, teach kids, make fairies & dragons, philosophize, and read fantasy. She doesn't HAVE spare time, but does like to fantasize about it! 
The craft of marbling, which flourished in Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East, first became known to Europeans only in the 16th and 17th centuries, and commercial production in England did not begin until the 1770s. One reason this took so long is that making marbled paper is complicated: liquid pigments are suspended on a liquid medium, creating the colorful swirls, and then transferred to paper laid upon them. In the case of Tristram Shandy's first edition, this was done by hand and repeated on both the front and back of a single page with the margins folded in—a process so involved that later versions of the book usually resorted to mechanized reproductions
Marbled paper was used for books, but also for other decorative purposes; linings for trunks, cabinets, instrument cases, and tea chests, to cover small decorative objects, and even as decoration for harpsichords. In the 17th century, production centered in France, Germany, and Holland. English bookbinders who wanted to use marbled paper for endsheets had an ingenious trick for avoiding the hefty customs duties levied on imported paper — toys and other small objects were wrapped in marbled paper for import. Once imported, the toys were unwrapped and the (untaxed) marbled wrapping paper was carefully smoothed out and sold to bookbinders.
Paste paper is a style of decorative paper made by coating the surface of paper with a thick pigmented starch adhesive (usually wheat paste or methylcellulose) and then manipulating the wet paste mixture to create patterns. Combs, stamps, brushes, wadded paper or textiles, rollers, fingers and more could be used to create designs. Paste papers were an economical alternative to marbled papers, which required a high degree of skill and costly materials to produce. No special training or supplies were needed to make paste papers; bookbinders could create them right in their workshops with materials already at hand.
Paste papers were most often used for book covers and endpapers and were popular from the late 16th through the 18th century. Paste papers are often seen on books from Germany and Northern Europe, although there are many lovely examples of block-printed paste papers from Italy. There was renewed interest in paste papers during the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Today, paste papers are still created by book artists and hobbyists, and can be seen on some fine-press editions. The examples on view represent just a fraction of the many beautiful paste papers found in Spencer’s collections and available to view in the Reading Room.
Paste papers are one of the early styles of decorative paper used in bookbinding, becoming a popular feature in books toward the end of the sixteenth century. They remained popular into the early nineteenth century, but were gradually replaced by marbled papers as industrial processes made marbling easier.
Combed paste paper designs were achieved by dragging a comb, brush, or finger across the still-wet coloured paste on the surface
