Notebook: Bonvini Golden Edition
Notebook: Bonvini Golden Edition
Fratelli Bonvini
The label on the front is gold-stamped from an original 1950s drawing in the Fratelli Bonvini archive - a small ruled frame, the kind once printed on a notebook so the owner could write their name and the year inside. Bonvini made this edition to mark the rediscovery, in the archive, of label no. 1: their very first design, from the late 1920s.
The cover is soft red board, the spine bound with Singer stitching - the visible machine-sewn seam that holds the signatures together and lets the book lie flat. Inside, the paper is made in Italy from food-industry waste and post-consumer recycled stock. When the notebook is finished, the paper can go back to where it came from.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
21 x 14.8cm
Cover: Flexible, Cherry Crush paper, 250 g. - Favini Paper Mill
64 pages
Internal: White page, 80 gsm Recycled Offset paper - Lecta paper mill
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.
