Imperial Paper

Ross MacDonald has posted about the period accurate notebooks and photo album he created for HBO's "Boardwalk Empire". The level of detail and research that went into the props is stunning.

"Prop master Tom Allen came out to my studio for a couple of meetings - we pored over period books, albums, scrapbooks and notebooks and talked about things we liked and didn't like about each. We also looked through my paper samples and binding material swatchbooks, but very few modern binding book-cloths resemble the stuff they were using in the early 20th century. The modern stuff is thin and hard and shiny and saturated and a poor substitute for the rich thick warm materials that binders worked with back in the day. I've done a lot of roadwork on finding period-looking materials to use on props, and whenever I stumble upon anything likely-looking I snap up as much as I can. I've had some stuff custom made for certain movie projects, but the mills have 60 to 100-yard minimum orders - that can be over a quarter ton of material, enough to fill the back of a pickup."

Here's a look at some of his reproduction work for the series. I dearly wish some were waiting for me under the Christmas tree. It's so ironic that small paper items like this were produced by the millions in the classic era, but have to be painstakingly produced by hand today.