The room above the shop
Paper, and how we end up choosing one.
Five mills, one ruling press, and a bench where every sheet gets written on before anybody is allowed to order a pallet of it.
A paper is not good or bad. It is good or bad with a particular ink, a particular nib and a particular hand, and the only honest way to find out is to sit down and write a page.
Five mills. Nine stocks in the building at any one time. Four of them fail the bench every year and get sent back, which is why the shop is small.
Joost Aalbersberg, bindery
We buy from five mills, four of them within a day's drive. Before a stock goes into anything we make, four of us fill a sheet of it — one with a fine steel nib, one with a broad italic, one with a soft pencil, one with a brush — and leave the sheets on the bench for a week to see what the light does. Most stocks fail that week. The ones that survive are the ones in this shop.
It means we carry fewer things than our customers would like. It also means that when somebody asks whether the 90 gsm will take a wet medium nib, the answer comes from somebody who has filled thirty pages of it rather than from a specification sheet.
The five are a wove mill in Gelderland, a laid mill outside Hattem, a small hand-made house in the Veluwe that supplies the deckled cards, a Japanese agent for the thin stock, and one in Lombardy we buy from once a year and argue with for the other eleven months.
From a sheet to a book
- 01
Cut and folded
A full sheet is guillotined into eight and folded three times with the grain running head to tail, so the pages turn without fighting the spine. Grain the wrong way is the single most common fault in a cheap notebook.
- 02
Ruled on the Albion
Brass rule is set, locked into a forme and printed one side at a time in a dilute grey. It takes an afternoon per batch and leaves a line you can feel, very slightly into the surface rather than sitting on top of it.
- 03
Sewn and cased in
Eleven sections are sewn onto two linen tapes, rounded and backed, and cased into boards covered in a cloth woven in Brabant. The ribbon goes in before the endpapers, which is why it never comes loose.
I came in for an A5 notebook and left two hours later with the wrong size, the right paper and a cup of tea. They talked me out of the expensive one.
Thijs Oosterwoud · architect, Zuiderwalstraat · buying for the practice since 2018
Nine stocks in the building · five mills
Come and write on it before you buy it.
Every stock we sell is in the sample book, cut to a full page, with a jar of pens beside it on the end of the bench. Sit down, fill a sheet, and see what your own hand does with it — that is the only test that has ever settled anything here.
If you cannot get to Elburg, write and say which pen and which ink and we will fill a sheet for you and post it. It costs nothing and it saves everybody a return.
