The Stationers Guild

Several years ago, my wife and I had the opportunity to tour Crane & Co.’s impressive printing and paper manufacturing plants in western Massachusetts.  Crane’s facilities are spread throughout a number of plants and buildings in and around Dalton and North Adams in the Berkshires along the Appalachian Trail.  The rich traditions of this 200 year-old company are literally everywhere.  While most towns have a Main Street, Dalton has Crane Avenue.  For a delightful two hours of American history and fascinating insights into the art of making paper, we certainly recommend a visit to Crane’s Museum of Papermaking.

One of the more interesting aspects of our visit was seeing how engraving dies are made and watching Crane’s skilled craftsmen hand-feed paper through the printing press.  Together with letterpress, engraving is one of the oldest and most traditional forms of printing.  It is often used for wedding invitations, baby announcements and for both business and social stationery.  The raising printing, opaque colors and bruising on the back of the paper are signs that the paper has been engraved.

In this excellent video, Peter Hopkins, who writes the Crane Insider Blog, describes the process of engraving in exceptional detail.  Short of visiting the plant, Peter’s video illustrates the care, craftmanship and labor-intensive process of creating fine engraved papers.

To see the rich colors and beautiful samples of Crane’s engraved papers, contact a Guild member store in your neighborhood for more information.

Richard May
Founding Member

Few things are more frustrating to an experienced stationer than to see “stationery” consistently misspelled.  While I am willing to concede that it is a rather mischievous word that may have originally been spelled with an “a”, I believe that most anyone applying for a professional position should be able to spell business stationery correctly.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there is actually a petition to change the spelling of stationery (as in paper) to stationary.  The central argument is that the majority of people conducting an online search for “wedding stationery” or “business stationery” actually spell stationery with an “ary.”   I haven’t decided whether this is democracy at work or simply a case of the inmates running the asylum.  I am sure that Mr. Webster would not be pleased.

After more research, I suspect that there is a more sinister plot afoot.  The culprit or facilitator of this assault on the English language is Google.  Rather than suggesting “Did you mean business stationery” when the user typed “business stationary” in the search bar, Google simply accepts the improper spelling. 

Business Stationary

Certainly, it is monetarily convenient for Google to capture their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) fees regardless of how stationery is spelled.  Unfortunately, for those of us responsible for mounting the PPC campaigns we must enter all forms of alternative spellings to insure that our ad will be found in a Google search.  Furthermore, even fine paper companies find themselves obliged to enter “stationary” in their meta tags and company description to insure that their pages will be indexed for misspellings. 

The final straw was listing a stationery store in Google maps.  Wendy Joblon, the owner of Folia in Dartmouth, MA was asked to list her store in one of the Google search categories:

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, but I had hoped that Google would allow us to categorize our business with the proper spelling of stationery.    Google maps are most important for small businesses and we believe this function could be significantly enhanced if search categories were spelled properly.

Richard May
Organizer and Founding Member

Well over a year ago, I received a late night phone call from my teacher, consultant and friend, Bud Kraus.  Bud is the enthusiastic author of Joy of Code, an online course on html and css coding, and avid proponent of designing to standards.  Bud and I had been working on putting together an RFP for a website to help independent stationers be “found” in an online search.  Barely able to contain his enthusiasm, he said “you just have to see this website:  Ante Meridiem Design.”  I did, and I was hooked.

Some months later I engaged Inguna Trepsa of Ante Meridiem Design to help redesign the Therese Saint Clair website and then the StationersGuild.org website, which was a somewhat less ambitious site than Bud and I had orginally envisioned.  While I am not a web designer, it is clear that Inguna’s stunning designs, straight-forward navigation, quick-to-load text and logical coding are clearly raising the bar for great website design.  I have never actually met Inguna or her equally charming husband, Gvido, but we have often connected many times by phone and  email.  Inguna has the singular ability to take vague ideas, moods, ill-defined concepts and turn them into great works of beauty supported by a logical and simple infrastructure.

Our Guild members owe Inguna a big hug and an immense debt of gratitude for helping us design a state-of-the-art website that supports brick-and-mortar stationers and the craftsmen whose fine papers we represent.  Many thanks Inguna.

Richard May
Founding Member, Stationers Guild

Elaine Barker of Paper Potpourri in Haverhill, MA is typical of many independent stationers who operate through brick and mortar stores throughout the United States and Canada. Elaine has been in business for 31 years and has been in the same store location for the last 15 years. Her reputation for designing custom invitations and personalized stationery attracts clients from all over the state of Massachusetts.

Elaine won this year’s coveted “Billy Award” for the best custom wedding invitation at the William Arthur conference in Kennebunk, Maine. The award is determined by a vote of her peers who vote on samples of custom wedding invitations that are submitted from leading stationers across the country. Elaine’s simple yet very personalized wedding invitation and supporting wedding papers stood out over the many outstanding designs submitted by her fellow stationers.

Elaine (left) and Evelyn Choie of Vera Wang

I had an opportunity to sit down with Elaine to discuss the creative process that went into the design of this stunning wedding invitation ensemble which reflected the very unique resort in Northern Michigan. The effervescent Elaine says that “I take great pride in providing personalized service and I love customization.  It is deeply satisfying to see the sparkle in a bride’s eyed as she sees her wedding invitation for the first time.  I see my role as helping couples and their families translate their vision of the “perfect” wedding into beautiful papers that reflect vision.”

This wedding was particularly memorable.  In February, Elaine sat down with the bride-to-be and her mother to sketch out the preliminaries of the wedding event such as timing, locations and likely color combinations.   Two months later, the bride’s mother provided Elaine with lovely hand-drawn motifs that would be used to tie all of the wedding papers together under a common theme.  Elaine notes that everything illustrated on the invitation packet was a significant part of the bride’s experience in growing up in the area of Northern Michigan. The bride was the 5^th generation of the family to summer on the shores of the area. The lighthouse on the invitation was the location of the reception; the sailboat on the Events and Activities Card was the family sailboat, the “Sophia Helen” named for the bride’s grandmother; the sailboats on the front of the navy pocket represented the local ”Northern Michigan” fleet, whose design dates back over 75 years, which races in the harbor; shown on the respond card was the motor launch called the “Pointer” which formerly served as transportation between the resort and a nearby town. The Pointer is now used to take people out for brief cruises and was used for the rehearsal dinner; a bicycle was used on the accommodation card as they are a favorite means of transportation in the area; a “carriage” was used on the direction card as no cars are allowed on the resort during July and August. Even the stamps on the envelopes were personalized with the mother’s hand-drawn motifs, the lighthouse on the invitation envelope and a seagull on the respond envelope and also the back flap of the invitation envelope as seagulls are her favorite bird. It’s fun when the whole family gets involved in the design process.”

Green and blue were the color combinations used for the wedding papers.  The bride decided that letterpress printing would bring out the subtle colors of the Northern Lake Michigan coast line and sky and opted for Vera Wang paper and the William Arthur paper pocket to assemble the wedding papers.  Needless to say, the groom, bride and her mother were thrilled with the outcome and so were their guests.

Elaine’s expertise and penchant for customer service is not uncommon among members of the Stationers Guild. Elaine notes that “my fellow stationers all love the beautiful papers we work with everyday. More importantly, we cherish the special relationships that are formed with our clients in helping them plan for significant events in their lives.”

Sheila P. May

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