Octavo No. 4
€24,00In stock
We sell paper you can still read your own handwriting on. Nothing in this shop is here because it photographs well — it is here because somebody on the bench filled one, ruined one, and asked for another.
Foolscap started as a bindery above a bicycle repair shop on Beekstraat and moved inside the walls in 2014, where the counter is now. We keep twelve things at a time. When a mill changes a stock we say so on the product, and when we run out we put the date we expect it back rather than a button that does nothing. Everything is priced in euros with Dutch VAT already in it.
How we choose a paper →
Six off the shelf
All twelve →
Gelder fountain pen
€118,00Made to order · three weeks
Bottled ink, 50 ml
€14,50In stock
Correspondence cards, fifty
€19,00In stock
Foolscap pads, pack of three
€16,50Sold out · back 14 April
Quarto ledger
€38,00Three left
It goes out this afternoon.
Orders placed before 14.00 on a working day leave Elburg the same day. Delivery is €4,95 anywhere in the Netherlands, €9,50 across the European Union, and nothing at all over €75. Bottled ink travels by road only, which adds a day to Spain and Portugal and two to Greece.
Thirty days, no reason needed.
Send anything back within thirty days of it arriving and we refund the item and the outward postage. A notebook you have written in is still returnable — we will take it apart for the bindery rather than resell it. Ink that has been opened is the one exception, for the obvious reason.
Upstairs, behind the counter
Everything ruled here is ruled on the old proof press.
Our rulings are not printed by the mill. A compositor sets the lines in brass rule, the forme is locked up, and the sheet goes through an Albion that has been in the building longer than we have. It is slower than ordering pre-ruled stock and it is the reason a Foolscap line sits slightly into the paper instead of on top of it.
You can feel it with a thumbnail. Most people do, in the shop, without being asked to.
Read how a sheet becomes a book →
Say it in your own hand, at the speed of your own hand.
Mireille Ravenstijn, who has run the counter since 2011
12things, kept well
Twelve things, kept well · Jufferenstraat 14, Elburg
Buy one notebook. Fill it. Come back and we will rebind it.
The shop holds twelve lines and nothing else. The counter is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00 to 18.00, and the sample book lives on the end of the bench for anybody who wants to ruin a few sheets before committing to a hundred of them.
Orders in before 14.00 leave the same afternoon. Thirty days to send anything back, written in or not — a filled book goes to the bindery to be taken apart, never back on the shelf.
