Offcut Notebook

We travelled to the small Tuscan village of Serrazzano, in Italy, in April, for a printmaking residency, producing an edition of our This Box is for Good series at Two Cents Press.

Left on the cutting room floor were pieces of beautiful Magnani Pescia paper. I couldn't bring myself to leave them there. So, in the waning hours of our residency, I turned them into an edition of 10 small notebooks, printing the cover on the Two Cents letterpress shop using a font of wood type.

Magnani Pescia paper is otherworldly: it's made of 100% cotton, and while it's recognizably paper, it feels and folds unlike any paper I've ever encountered. I love it.

Magnani paper was produced at mills in the village of Pescia, not far from Lucca, from 1404 until 2014, when circumstances, including a landslide on the road into the village, led to its untimely end. Franco Marinai, of Two Cents Press, purchased this paper many years ago, from original stock, and so in addition to being otherworldly, it's also a relic of a 610 year old papermaking tradition.

The notebooks measure 10 x 7 cm (4 x 2¼ inches), and contain 10 pages; the cover and pages are all of the same Pescia paper, and the notebooks are hand sewn, with a pamphlet stitch, in baker's twine.

These are true offcuts, so the stock has the leftover impressions of the pamphlet that they are offcuts of -- small black marks on the bottom right of one side of each sheet. They are "perfectly imperfect," an improvised rush job to rescue some lovely paper.

Shipped via Canada Post.