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 animal-skin glue and is indistinguishable from its historical antecedent.

Adelphi uses crossbanded woodblocks faced with pearwood. The paints used in printing are hand mixed. The first color is applied to the block and impressed onto the paper using a nineteenth-century press. The paper is then hung to dry before the next color is applied--a process that is repeated until the pattern is complete. After printing, the wallpaper is touched up by hand with distemper, exactly as the original papers were. This gives each paper slight variations not found in modem silk-screened papers. Among the historic houses where one may see examples of Adelphi wallpapers are the George Wythe House at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, the Nathaniel Russell House owned by the Historic Charleston Foundation in South Carolina, Gunston Hall in Mason Neck, Virginia, and Tryon Palace in New Bern, North Carolina. Many privately owned historic houses are hung with these papers. Adelphi also undertakes custom work.

Each Adelphi paper reproduces a period example and is printed only in documented colorways. The firm is currently re-creating wallpapers and borders for several institutions with collections of period wallpapers, among them the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Old Sturbridge Village, and the New York State Historical Association. The wallpapers are offered to the trade through Stark Wallcovering and its outlets, which are listed on Adelphi's informative Web site (www.adelphipaperhangings.com). The production facility is located in an 1880s hardware store in Sharon Springs, New York, and the company office is located in The Plains Virginia. Adelphi may be contacted by telephoning 540-253-5367 or by fax at 540-253-5388.

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