Greeting card: Policeman
Greeting card: Policeman
Fratelli Bonvini
In the drawers behind the counter at Fratelli Bonvini, there are printing plates - clichés - in lead, copper and wood, accumulated across more than a century of printing for Milanese businesses. The shop is going through them: cataloguing, restoring, and digitising what each one prints.
This card is from cliche number 14 of the 1909 archive: a policeman springing out of a jack-in-the-box, arms thrown up at the surprise of his own arrival, drawn with the comic timing that mid-century Italian commercial artists brought to advertising posters and shopfront notices. The original plate would only wear further if it were used to print, so Bonvini has digitised the image, cut a new magnesium matrix from the file, and pressed the design back onto paper from there. Here in red.
The cliché stays in the drawer, a silent witness. The design returns to use.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Greeting card with envelope
Medium 11 x 16.5cm
Small 8 x 13cm
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.
