Throughout the seventeenth century books were generally bound in leather or vellum while the hand-decorated paper was only used inside the book.
During the depression after the French Revolution, in order to reduce costs since leather was increasingly expensive and difficult to find, French bookbinders started to bind books using half-leather covers, in other words, only the spine of the book in leather and the cover boards in paper.
Also, in this case, it is the solution to a technical problem and not the beauty of the patterns, which changed the look of bookbinding. Marbled paper is among those hand-decorated papers most frequently used.