More paper!
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how Clairefontaine paper is made. Another Quo Vadis sister company, G. Lalo, takes a different approach, using a process that’s much closer to the hand-made method I—and doubtless many others—used as a kid during summer camp.
That technique, in which simple wood-framed screens are dipped into big vats of “pulp” (we used torn up scraps of old magazines mixed with a little bit of water) and then let to dry in the sun, produces a coarser, thicker paper; the only real difference between it and the G. Lalo process is that the latter uses special machines to spray the pulp onto the screens in a much more uniform fashion. But you can still see the faint lines once the paper has dried. The thickness of G. Lalo paper makes it ideal for cards and social stationary—in fact, Katharine Hepburn used blue “Lettre Royale” for her correspondence.
