Getting creative with paper

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Frances Follin reports on ‘Beauty in the Making’, celebrating the art and craft of paper and print

When I first started work as a young graduate in 1979, I was employed as a sales executive by a London printing company, Robert Stockwell, which handled a mixture of City and fine art work. During the 1980s the fine art and the corporate work converged as annual reports competed to be more opulent and visually exciting than each other. High-quality colour printing was demanded by all, as well as techniques such as gold blocking, blind embossing and silk screen printing.

Increasingly, the paper on which these ostentatious publications were printed became part of the competition. Coloured and textured papers and ‘boards’ (the thicknesses of paper used for covers, which could be very substantial), ‘silk’ and ‘satin’ finishes, abounded. Every designer wanted something new. It extended even to corporate stationery. On one occasion, I presented a large swatch of coloured papers to the managing director of a design consultancy. He flicked through it rapidly, settled on two, which he then held against the mushroom-coloured phone on his desk. He called out to a colleague, ‘I think this one goes best, don’t you?’ The colleague concurred and that (expensive) paper was used for all their stationery.

So where did all this wonderful paper come from? Stockwell’s dealt with a number of paper merchants but for the most exciting coloured and textured papers, and the greatest variety of colours (such as the two shades of mushroom considered by my picky client), G.F. Smith was the place to go. No matter how demanding, it was a rare client who wasn’t happy with something from Smith’s.

Yet paper is something that is often overlooked by the public, who don’t stop to think what a difference choice of paper makes to anything from a thank you note to a book – or indeed a corporate brochure. For five days at the end of April this year, G.F. Smith decided to ‘go public’ with their wares, and to involve a number of other organisations in showing off what can be done with paper. Taking over a vast basement in Holborn, the company made it seem as if it had always been used as an exhibition space. All the exhibits at 'Beauty in the Making' were displayed with a flair that would have done justice to many an art show.

It is no secret that paper is made from wood  (or much of it is, some is made from cotton, and other fibres can be used). ‘Beauty in the Making’ began by showing how pieces of wood are transformed into pulp by specialist companies such as Södra Cell, which produces 425,000 tonnes of woodpulp annually. This is a highly sustainable process, with more trees planted than cut down and great energy efficiency.

The pulp is formed into coarse board for transport to paper mills. Here it is rendered back into pulp – a solution of 1% wood fibre, 99% water and dye, carefully monitored for colour accuracy and overall composition. Deposited on a fine wire (the watermark may be part of the wire and so become set into the paper, or applied later via a roller), the paper drains, dries and solidifies, being pressed by rollers to release more of the water. Alison Rigg of James Cropper paper mill gave us a demonstration on a miniature wire.

The paper may be coated with a clay-based coating to give ‘art’ papers, calendered between rollers to give a smooth surface, and/or embossed with a texture. G.F.Smith’s Colorplan range has 56 colours available with 25 different textured surfaces – linen, leather, coltskin, sandgrain…. The James Cropper papermill, which makes the range, actually produces 3,700 different colours of paper for various customers.

Of course, if you buy lovely stationery paper, you will want matching envelopes. Standard ‘DL’ envelopes are made by machine but more unusual sizes are made by hand. I had a go and over several minutes produced a rather imperfect effort – I was told that a skilled maker can fold, stick and apply the self-seal strip to 300 perfect envelopes an hour. I decided not to apply!

As a sales exec at Stockwell’s, I could only watch the printing machines, some of which were ‘platen’ presses – probably the oldest kind of letterpress still in use. At ‘Beauty in the Making’, luxury stationery printers Downey had brought along some very dinky ‘baby’ hand-operated platens and I was able to have go myself, under the direction of Leo Turner. Great fun, though even these machines required a bit more force than I could really produce unaided – Leo helpfully provided the extra strength to print one little card.

Then it was on to see what the Monotype Corporation’s part of the show. Stockwell’s was a letterpress company, and monotype – where each letter is a single piece of metal – was the format used. (Newspapers used to use Linotype – where all the letters in a line of print are formed in a single piece of metal.) The Monotype Corporation has an illustrious history. Type designed by figures such as the artist Eric Gill (1882–1940; the originator of the Gill Sans and Perpetua typefaces) have ensured that the company is known for elegant, well-designed typefaces. So good was Monotype Corporation at working with metal that, as the show revealed, in the Second World War the firm was asked to turn its precision metal-working skills over to the making of guns.

Monotype also helped in the war effort in other ways. Hitler’s government used Monotype faces for many publications, so Monotype became involved in forging documents to fool the enemy. Their display at ‘Beauty in the Making’ included original drawings, ten inches (254mm) across, of designs for individual letters. When you think how small a letter is when printed, even in ‘large type’, you have to be impressed at the detail contained within each one. Perhaps it is not surprising that some changes had to be made when the drawings were adapted for production of the actual metal type. Further adaptations for filmsetting and digital faces have followed, and of course new faces are continually designed.

The British Council contributed to ‘Beauty in the Making’ with a display of eight graphic design projects. A colourful poster advertises a British/Korean collaboration, the Happiness for Daily Life café in Korea – who would go to Starbucks if they had that as an option? The Council commissioned design agency Objectif to design the typographic identity of its ADF series of publications on aspects of design. ADF encourages dialogue between emerging UK designers and those overseas.

Objectif also worked on the British Council’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2010. The displays here involved collaboration with artists, designers, scientists studying the lagoon and curators from the Venice Natural History museum, to produce the colourfully named ‘Villa Frankenstein’.

All the displays showed how the crafts of papermaking and printing are surviving, adapting and contributing to culture and commerce in the digital age. The managing director of Stockwell’s, Humphrey Jones, used to say that the more computer technology expanded, the more there would be to print. How right he was.