Shop Note

Gold Figures

Terence Lynock

Years ago when I was in the bookbinding trade doing mainly hand bound work the gold leaf came in books of 25 sheets about 3.5'' square, the real stuff is so thin it will curl and pile up in a little heap if you so much as breath on it, we had to use a Martingale masks to stop this happening too often.

To lift the leaf we had what was called a gilders tip, this was just a piece of card with long fine hairs along one side like a very skimpy paint brush about 3'' wide and only two or three bristles thick, you rubbed the tip over your hair to allow it to pick up a little oil and then the tips of the bristles touched to the edge of the leaf which would cling to the slightly oily bristle tips, you could then lift the gold leaf and lift it onto your pad.

We all had a flat pad with a 6'' square piece of leather glued to it suede side up like velvet, you lifted the sheet of leaf onto this then used a blunt edged knife to dissect the sheet by pressing the knife edge on the leaf and just moving the knife blade slightly as though trying to cut the leaf, this was enough to split the sheet of gold leaf as it was only about 2 micron thick, you then picked up the bits on another smaller gilders tip kept for the job to apply it to the work.

For a bright brassy gold colour we used yellow ochre under the gold or if we wanted a red gold finish we used red bole which is like ochre in that it is an earth pigment, as we only used heated tools for putting the gold down we used whipped egg white as an adhesive, this was just the white separated from the yolk then whipped up to a froth, this was applied to the leather and while still wet a piece of gold leaf applied over the top, the heated tool or lettering tool was then impressed onto the gold.

This 'fried' the egg white gluing the gold leaf to the leather, you then used a 'gold rubber' which was a lump of pure latex to rub over the lettering to remove any waste or excess leaf, over a period of time the latex would absorb a lot of gold and from time to time it was collected by the boss and sent away for processing to reclaim the gold contained in it, nothing went to waste, hand bound books are now history but it was a trade that had a lot in common with model making in a way, we had pride in what we did and like model ship building we were always searching for perfection.
{ Terence Lynock }

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