Twelve pencil set
Twelve pencil set
Fratelli Bonvini
These pencils are made for Fratelli Bonvini by an old European pencil factory: cedar shaft, soft graphite lead, hexagonal in section so the pencil sits flat against the fingers and won't roll off a desk.
The colour is the shop's own. The same green that lines the wooden shelves at Bonvini in Milan, and that covered the handmade stationery boxes the shop packed for the businesses around it. The pencil carries the colour into a current hand.
Twelve pencils to a pack, in a classic Bonvini box.
Exclusive to Australia.
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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.
