Boss Print has published the third in a series of notebooks, intended as a promotional piece to show off the company’s skills at press work, value added finishing and binding, but also available to buy online.
The third Notebook, like the first two, was designed by Carter Wong Design. It was released at a launch event at Fedrigoni’s Clerkenwell showroom last week, together with the most extraordinary back story.
The idea for the notebooks stemmed from discussions between printer and designer three years ago. Boss Print founder Fenton Smith wanted to promote the west London business to other design companies. It resulted in Found Fonts, a notebook intended to show off the printer’s skills with extensive embossing and debasing as well as stochastic printing.
Last year Philip Carter came up with a design based around the protective wrappings around old style razor blades, that he had discovered in Rome. Like the first version, this proved highly popular.
Now the pair have excelled in producing a third version built around a serendipitous visit to a car boot fair in Chiswick. “All designers collect things,” Carter says. “We are like magpies collecting stuff and at the boot fair I found a cellophane bag full of ephemera.
“When I got it back and spread across a table I could that there was a story. It was the collection of the year in the life of one person, someone who had spent that year in Heidelberg. That was the killer for us.”
Heidelberg Bound is the result, printed using Fedrigoni papers: Arcoprint Milk for the body pages, Symbol Matt 170gsm for embossed pages with a 170gsm Winner Agenda cover. It was printed on Boss Print’s 12-year-old Speedmaster CD74 and bound in sewn sections.
While it was simple to discover that the woman was called Frances Foote and that she had lived in Mitcham, Carter could find no other trace of her.
“She was obviously a woman of culture, a regular visitor to concerts, the theatre and cinema. We had the tickets, tram and bus tickets, even shoe repair slips. Perhaps we weren’t expected to find her,” he said.
He completed the design for the notebook and had sent it to be printed when he found the obituary of a Frances Foote-Wood and emailed her husband to ask if his wife might have been the mystery woman. She was.
Chris Foote-Wood is an author and former council leader from County Durham and delivered the extra twist by filling in details of his wife’s background, including why she had been in Heidelberg. She had left school with a C&G qualification in needlework having been considered slow by the teachers. She moved to a domestic work agency where, encouraged by her experiences in travelling alone in Europe, sent her to work in a household in Heidelberg headed by a professor of mathematics. He encouraged her to return to her studies.
That led to a teacher training college, jobs as a teacher and then in the civil service, working also for the Liberal Party, which earned her an OBE, before succumbing to cancer.
“She was against marriage so I had to pursue her,” said her widower. “I had been married before and she didn’t want to be the second Mrs Wood.”
She had come from a strong working class background as had he, Chris Foote-Wood said. “My father was a musician and writer who strongly believed that working class life should be presented on stage. It led to his involvement as one of the first script writers on Coronation Street and creating the background stories for the early characters.”
And he explained to the guests he had earlier this year lost his younger sister to cancer. When he said that she had been a comedian and that her name had been Victoria, the room was stunned, the final surprise in an extraordinary story.
The third in a series, Heidelberg Bound is the latest notebook to be built on design expertise from Carter Wong, paper from Fedrigoni and print from Boss Print. It uses a collection of ephemera from a British girl’s stay in Heidelberg 50 years ago, a chance find in a west London bootfair with an incredible story behind it.
