Wallpaper

Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, cafes, government buildings, museums, post offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste. Wallpapers can come plain as "lining paper" (so that it can be painted or used to help cover uneven surfaces and minor wall defects thus giving a better surface), textured (such as Anaglypta), with a regular repeating pattern design, or, much less commonly today, with a single non-repeating large design carried over a set of sheets.

Wallpaper printing techniques include surface printing, gravure printing, silk screen-printing, rotary printing, and digital printing. Wallpaper is made in long rolls, which are hung vertically on a wall. Patterned wallpapers are designed so that the pattern "repeats", and thus pieces cut from the same roll can be hung next to each other so as to continue the pattern without it being easy to see where the join between two pieces occurs. In the case of large complex patterns of images this is normally achieved by starting the second piece halfway into the length of the repeat, so that if the pattern going down the roll repeats after 24 inches, the next piece sideways is cut from the roll to begin 12 inches down the pattern from the first. The number of times the pattern repeats horizontally across a roll does not matter for this purpose. A single pattern can be issued in several different colorways.

The world's most expensive wallpaper, 'Les Guerres D'Independence' (The Wars of Independence), was priced at £24,896.50 ($44,091, or €36,350) for a set of 32 panels. The wallpaper was designed by Zuber in France and is very popular in the United States.

The main historical techniques are: hand-painting, woodblock printing (overall the most common), stencilling, and various types of machine-printing. The first three all date back to before 1700.

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