Florence leather, bound in the Oltrarno

Cross the Arno away from the crowds and Florence turns into a workshop district. The Oltrarno's artisans have bound books, tooled leather and marbled paper since the Medici were the customers: vegetable-tanned hides worked by hand, gold leaf pressed letter by letter, endpapers made by floating pigment on a bath of water and combing it into feathers.

Vegetable tanning is slow and it shows its age well: a Florentine satchel darkens and softens for decades instead of cracking. Marbled paper cannot repeat itself even if the marbler tries, because the pigment never lands twice the same way.

The workshops are small, often one family, and the shop door on a side street is easy to miss even standing in front of it. Their pin on 1VIM is not: the listing ships from Florence with the door price shown before you pay, and the notebook you buy was sewn by the hands on the pin.