Notebook: Campari
Notebook: Campari
Fratelli Bonvini
Between 1926 and 1936, Fortunato Depero produced around a hundred advertising graphics for Campari - geometric, mechanical, often almost abstract, Italian Futurism with a playful streak. He designed the Campari Soda bottle, unchanged since 1932, along with the posters.
The cover of this notebook takes one of those pieces - Presi il Bitter Campari fra le nuvole, I took the Campari Bitter in the clouds - redrawn front and back by the type studio Cabaret Typographie, in the Futurist palette of red, gold, blue and pink.
It belongs to Bonvini's Quaderni d'Autore: a series of notebooks made with artists from Bonvini's broader cultural programme of exhibitions, residencies and publications. The spine is Singer-stitched - the machine-sewn seam that holds the signatures and lets the book lie flat - and the paper inside is made in Italy from post-consumer recycled stock, blank for whatever follows.
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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.
