Current Events & Trends | September 2023 | Beth Kephart

Beth Kephart on The Secret Language of Endpapers

Beth Kephart

Marble endpaper by Beth Kephart for her book The Secret Language of Endpapers

This is a guest post by Beth Kephart, author of My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press, out on November 3)

I like to imagine the early guilds of the paper marblers —the rooms in which beauty was made and secrets kept. Master to apprentice the news was whispered down—the liquid bed of chemicals upon which the colors would be made to float; the patterning of vivid hues and muted complements; the combing and raking that mimicked peacock feathers, starry nights, rickrack or exotic stones; the precise way in which the mordanted paper was to be laid upon the floating color so that no annoying air bubbles would mar the finished product.

The practice had made its way to sixteenth-century Europe by way of China, Japan, and the Middle East. With the ornamental papers the subject of art lust and steely competition among bookbinders and booksellers, master marblers shielded prying eyes by working in locked rooms, often late at night, in a manner that often left the apprentices themselves in the dark about the every-step-ism of the process. It wasn’t until Londoner Charles W. Woolnough had the audacity to publish The Whole Art of Marbling as Applied to Paper, Book Edges, etc. in 1881 that unguilded artists had the chance to have marbling fun on their own.

I’m most decidedly unguilded—an amateur artist married to an actual artist who has, late in life, gone all in on paper. The paper I make by tearing my own books into shreds (and rushing to the garden to gather accents). The paper I cyanotype and collage. The paper I cut and score and stitch into books. And the paper that I marble.

Temple University

Cover for The Secret Language of Endpapers

Beth Kephart

Marble endapaper by Beth Kephart

Beth Kephart

Marble endpaper by Beth Kephart

I’d been messing with paper for a few years before I encountered, thanks to a gift my brother gave me, the great handmade paper scholar and crafter Dard Hunter. My sudden obsession with Hunter led me to The Life Work of Dard Hunter, a book compiled by Hunter’s son and grandson (both named Dard), which includes, among many things, the images of the marbled papers Hunter made while studying in Vienna. The more work I do as an amateur marbler, the more respect I have for the shapes Hunter urged from his trays of color. Flower shapes. Lightning strikes. A continuum of wings.

My own endpapers are paisley patterned and zig-zagged. They can look (to me) like astronomical systems and, sometimes, like a single solitary planet. Given the privilege of designing both the cover and the endpapers for my new book, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (a title that gives a deliberate nod to Hunter), I was keen on creating a density of color and pattern, something vivid and (I hoped) so enticing that readers would not simply rush past the endpapers on their way to the table of contents, but remain with them, or return to them, so that they might see, in the art itself, a foreshadowing of the story to come.

For like the marbling, My Life in Paper is built of swirls and recurrences, saturations and retreats, intensities and urgencies that echo and recur. The endpapers anticipate. The endpapers pause. The endpapers, if you listen to them, whisper.