Greeting card: Auguri
Greeting card: Auguri
Fratelli Bonvini
In the 1930s, the Fausto Gallico foundry cast a typographic frieze called Gloria - a set of small modular ornaments meant to be composed into decorative borders. It has been in the Fratelli Bonvini archive ever since.
For this card, the type studio Cabaret Typographie digitised those frieze elements and built something else from them entirely: a moka pot, the Italian stovetop coffee maker, assembled square by square from the old ornament, with AUGURI - best wishes - set into the base.
It is a holiday card, and a small piece of the Bonvini archive put back to work.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Greeting card with envelope
21 x 18cm
About Fratelli Bonvini
There is a stationery shop on Via Tagliamento in Milan where the colours on the walls, the cabinets, and the wooden drawers are the ones installed in 1909. Fratelli Bonvini has been a working shop that entire time, and it looks it - not restored to look old, but old, continuously, without a break.
Costante Bonvini opened it that year. He had noticed that people in the district were travelling kilometres for paper and ink, so he opened a stationery shop and brought his sister Luigia in to run it with him. Before long it was a printworks as well: Bonvini designed and printed for an industrial quarter that was expanding fast - letterhead, posters, wine labels, the work a whole neighbourhood needed done. Three presses carried it, among them a platen press from the nineteenth century.
By 2011 the shop had passed out of the family, and it was close to closing for good. In 2014 a group of printers and typographers took it on - not to modernise it, but to keep it exactly as it was. Every fixture stayed. The presses still run.
What Bonvini makes now is letterpress: artworks, cards, notebooks, and pencils, printed in that same room, on those same machines, by people who took the place on precisely because it had not changed.
Fratelli Bonvini is exclusive to Australia at The Leopard.
