PROPERLY MADE PAPER

Best quality handmade papers for us and for people like us.

 

Vintage Paper Co are extremely passionate about and knowledgeable about paper - after all it's where our professional adventures began all those years ago and it's still absolutely key to who we are and what we do.

What is VPCo Handmade Paper?

It's a range of versatile, premium quality, affordable, European handmade paper for printmaking, bookbinding, drawing and painting.

All VPCo papers are handmade from a 60/40 blend of cotton and linen rag which offers strength, robustness, dimensional stability, sheet-to-sheet consistency and character. The papers are internally sized with aquapel (AKD dimer); the watercolour papers are additionally surface sized with a choice of starch or gelatine. 

Most importantly, it has the properties that we admire in papers made during the golden age of British papermaking by manufacturers such as J Whatman and Barcham Green. If you've ever had the pleasure of using any of these then you'll know what we're saying.

This is a product born out of necessity.

As pattern printers and bookbinders we've been unable to find a range of off-the-shelf, consistently good quality, affordable European handmade paper that does everything we want it to do and believe us, we've tried virtually every paper there is. 

For us, the quality of paper is the most important element in printing, bookbinding, drawing and painting. Experience tells us that bad paper just gets in the way of doing a good job; good paper makes it easy. If you have to compromise at the start of a project everything that comes after is compromised. 

There are some magnificent British, American and European handmade papers available from a few brilliant makers whose work we adore. For very small projects they're always brilliant but in the way we work, using hundreds of sheets for our projects, especially as pages in books and for printing covers using them just isn't viable.

This is why we made a massive investment and developed our own paper- we call it VPCo Handmade Paper; it's made for print, bookbinding, drawing and painting.

We feel we've acheived this and we're very proud to present VPCo Handmade papers.  

VPCo Handmade Paper works with:

Inks, pens, pencil, paint. watercolour brush pens, oil pastels, Conte, graphite, chalk and for the traditional printmaking processes including letterpress, screen printing, digital inkjet, marbling, cyanotype, lino. 

The surface is and strong smooth, each sheet has four tight natural deckled edges. Being handmade there is no grain direction giving it maximum versatility for use in the book arts.

VPCo Heavyweight is a vintage white 220gsm (heavyweight) smooth surfaced handmade paper for print and drawing. A soft white version will be available very soon.

Watermarks - "VPCo" & "Handmade". Papers made with high linen content also have an "L" watermark.