Enid Marx's Chaise Longue Paper
Quercus is an original Cambridge Imprint design, first published in spring 2022. It’s a pattern of alternating stripes of oak leaves and spots with an Arts and Crafts feel.
Cambridge Imprint is a small paper-making business in Cambridge, England, designing and printing patterned paper. It is known for beautiful colours, joyful illustration and typography, a lively, hand-drawn aesthetic, and meticulous attention to detail.
Using simple hand-stencilled screen-printing to create original designs, Cambridge Imprint employ spot-colour lithography to replicate the studio process in manufacturing the final paper product. The result is a matte paper of unparalleled intensity and clarity of colour, not to mention quality!
This pattern is a reconstruction and reproduction of a hand-block printed textile by Enid Marx, which covers a chaise longue in the permanent collection at Compton Verney. Enid Marx was a pattern designer and illustrator whose career spanned much of the twentieth century: a contemporary and friend of Bawden, Ravilious and Angus, and an apprentice of textile printers Barron and Larcher in the 1920s. This paper was created on the occasion of the exhibition ‘The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design’ at Compton Verney in 2026. In reproducing the pattern we tried to preserve the rhythm and spontaneity of the infinitely various interconnected lozenges created by Marx’s free printing style. Marx called this design ‘Fairy and Stipple’.
Cambridge Imprint paper is printed in England on responsibly sourced paper of archiving quality, using hand-mixed inks. Each sheet is printed in one or two colours on uncoated 90 gsm stock to create a high-quality matte paper with a hand-printed feel to it.
Each sheet measures 50 cm x 70 cm.