Gold Tooling and Leather Tooling
Gold tooling is the technique of impressing lettering or decorative designs in gold leaf onto leather, most commonly using heated metal tools. Traditionally, high-purity gold leaf was used, often around 22–23 carat. Blind tooling employs the same basic method without gold, leaving the decoration impressed directly into the leather.
Blind tooling has a much earlier history, with examples surviving on Coptic bindings from Egypt from around the seventh and eighth centuries. Gold decoration developed later in Islamic bookbinding and became well established in Egypt and the wider Middle East by the fourteenth century. From there, gold tooling influenced Italian bookbinding, particularly in Venice, before spreading more widely through Europe.
Traditionally, the design was first laid out and often lightly blind-tooled into the leather. An adhesive known as glaire, commonly prepared from egg white, was applied to the areas intended to receive the gold and allowed to dry. Thin gold leaf was then laid over the surface and the heated tool pressed into the original impression. The heat helped fix the gold into the prepared leather, leaving a sharply defined gilded design.
A wide range of brass finishing tools allowed complex decoration to be built up from individual impressions. Lettering tools produced individual letters, numbers and punctuation; pallets and ornaments created lines and decorative motifs; gouges formed curves and sections of circles; while fillets and rolls could produce continuous lines or repeating patterns.
On nineteenth-century boxes, gold and blind tooling were used extensively to decorate leather-lined interiors. They can be found on removable trays, interior walls, mirror frames, concealed letter wallets and writing surfaces, as well as on makers’ and retailers’ marks. The techniques could range from a simple gold line around the edge of a tray to elaborate floral borders, crests, lettering and repeating ornament.
Manufacturers including Asprey, Edwards and Leuchars made extensive use of gold tooling on their boxes.
