I may be giving away one of my signature approaches here, but adding sprinkled gold leaf to decorated book edges is a favourite approach of mine. It's relatively simple to do and the effect can be stunning. It can be done on the head, tail and fore edge, though the burnishing on a rounded fore edge is a little more fiddly. The edge has been sanded to a very smooth finish and sized with a weak paste/water mix. Once dry it was decorated with acrylic ink and is now ready for the gold leaf. . .