Notebook: Naviglio Grande
Notebook: Naviglio Grande
Fratelli Bonvini
Carlo Stanga is an Italian architect, illustrator and author, now working out of Berlin. He trained in architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan, then under designers including Bruno Munari, and has spent the years since drawing for La Repubblica, the Wall Street Journal, UNESCO, and clients across Europe and the United States.
This notebook's cover, front and back, is his. It is part of Bonvini's Quaderni d'Autore - a series of notebooks made with artists who work alongside the historic Milan stationery shop on its broader cultural programme of exhibitions, residencies and publications.
The spine is Singer-stitched - the visible machine-sewn seam that holds the signatures and lets the book lie flat. The paper inside is made in Italy from post-consumer recycled stock, blank, for whatever the owner needs to put there.
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.
