Cotton, not pulp. 500 grams per square metre, made to last a lifetime between the pages of a book.
One hundred fine art images, selected from years of work: landscapes, light, places that asked to be kept close.
Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 500 g/m². The matte cotton surface used in museums, printed with archival pigment inks.
Cut, sleeved and packed one by one in the studio in Italy.
Most paper today is made from wood pulp. It yellows. It cracks. Over twenty or thirty years it stops looking like the paper you printed on.
Cotton paper is made from the long fibres of the cotton plant. It is acid neutral, dimensionally stable, and resistant to light and humidity, the standard used by museums and archives for prints meant to outlast the people who own them.
Each bookmark is printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 500 grams per square metre. Heavy in the hand, soft to the touch, with a faint matte texture you can feel between your fingers.
The Hahnemühle paper mill has stood in the same valley in Lower Saxony for more than four centuries. Its Photo Rag is one of the most widely used fine art papers in the world.
It is a standard choice for fine art photography and for archival editions held in museums and galleries. There was no reason to choose anything else.
There are two ways to put colour on paper. Dye inks penetrate the fibre. Brilliant for a few years, then they begin to fade.
Pigment inks sit on the surface as solid particles, each suspended in a fluid carrier. Properly printed and stored, they are rated beyond a century of light fastness, with no visible shift in tone.
Each bookmark is printed with archival pigment inks, calibrated for the cotton paper underneath.
Each bookmark is cut by hand to six by eighteen centimetres (about 2½ × 7 inches). Singles travel in a protective sleeve. Sets are arranged in a black box, the five bookmarks separated by sheets of acid-free glassine.
It is slow work. It is also the only way to be sure each piece leaves the studio the way it should.
