Today we have a very special guest post from one of my all-time favorite paper peeps, Jason Arbuckle of J. Falkner. Without further ado, I’ll let him tell his trans-Atlantic tale.
Blimey! Do we have big news to share. Big, as in Big Ben Big. Starting this month, our cards will be available in London, and throughout the British Isles.
Here’s how it happened. Back in May, Sarah and William Allardice from Archivist Press, “the home of British letterpress,” alighted upon our cards at the National Stationery Show … and thought our collection might sit happily among their own cards.
And don’t they just? After a summer spent fine tuning our designs to fit their formats and printing process, Archivist launched the J.Falkner Collection of letterpress cards at the Top Drawer gift show in London last month. You can see a glimpse of our London letterpress debut above.
All our cards are flat-printed in the U.S., so to see them re-interpreted in letterpress made us feel a little like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” when she steps out of her old house into the exuberant technicolor of Oz. The rich inks, gorgeous paper stock and deep impression of type definitely made our hearts sing!
Archivist cards are printed in rural England on vintage windmill presses. And their paper, sourced from sustainable forests, is milled in the heart of the Lake District. If those two sentences alone don’t restore your faith in the romance of the written word, I don’t know what will.
Another feather in the Archivist cap are the luxury matchboxes they produce. They cleverly took our little doxie holiday card and made it into the adorable matchbox above — so now we know what all our friends will be getting in their stockings. (Shh!)
The J.Falkner Collection of cards are now available online from the Archivist website (plus! they ship to the U.S., Canada and Europe), and they are heading out to UK retailers like Paperchase, The Conran Shop, and Fortnum & Mason in the next few weeks. Cheerio, then! We’re grabbing our brollie and going out shopping …
P.S. The J.Falkner Collection letterpress cards are exclusive to UK stores and consumer orders off the Archivist website, but our whole range of offset printed cards are available in the U.S. for wholesale and individuals. Check out over 150 designs at www.jfalkner.com.
