Woodblock-printed wallpaper. (Design Notes).

Before the invention of the roller printer, which revolutionized both the wallpaper and textile industries in the mid-nineteenth century, making wallpapers was a laborious task achieved by painting the background color onto the paper, and then transferring the pattern onto the paper one color at a time by means carved and inked woodblocks. Because continuous rolls of paper were not in widespread use until the middle of the nineteenth century, wallpapers of the appropriate length were created by gluing sheets together before painting the ground and printing the pattern. This process always left a horizontal seam in the wallpaper.

In 1999 the wallpaper specialists Chris Ohrstrom and Steve Larson formed Adelphi Paper Hangings, a company devoted to re-creating wallpapers produced between about 1720 and 1860 with utmost fidelity to the originals. They use acid-free paper made from cotton, which is much more durable than paper made from wood because the cotton fibers are much longer. The sheets of paper are trimmed to uniform size and then joined with rabbit-skin glue.

The rolls thus formed are laid out on a table where they are painted with a coat of ground color of distemper. The firm offers two options in this process. The first, which was used to make the original papers, is to use traditional distemper paint--a mixture of whiting (chalk or calcium carbonate), pigment, sometimes china clay, and water, with a binder of rabbit-skin or hide glue. The main drawbacks. of this recipe are that the paper is difficult to install without proper training, and if it gets wet, it runs or smudges. For these reasons Adelphi recommends this method only for museums and historic houses. They have developed what they call an "ersatz distemper" that incorporates a modem binder in place of ...