Notebook: Spritz
Notebook: Spritz
Fratelli Bonvini
Bonvini's Quaderni d'Autore - Author's Notebooks - is a series made with the artists, illustrators and designers who work alongside the shop on its wider cultural programme: the exhibitions, workshops, residencies and limited editions that Bonvini hosts and publishes from its Milan home.
Each notebook in the series carries a different cover, front and back, by a different hand. The work is always specific. The pieces look back, often through memory and through the languages of older craft, and they look at the present from there. Different subjects, different techniques, one series.
The notebooks themselves are made the same way each time. Singer stitching binds the spine - the visible 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 the owner wants to put there.
A working archive of contemporary Italian making, kept in pocket form.
Exclusive to Australia.
Couldn't load pickup availability
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.
