Papery pleasures: San Francisco

But let’s start at the beginning. En route to breakfast, I make two stop-and-hops, so that Pam and Kim can see: (1)  the Hotel Majestic {San Francisco’s oldest continuously operating hotel}, where they admire the capering-monkey murals in the elevator and the blue butterflies in the bar; (2) the mostly glass façade of Timeless Treasures. Pam  announces her wish to buy the letters W-I-L-D.

We have breakfast at Louis’, a San Francisco landmark, and a first for me. Breakfast tastes fine in our window booth perched on the edge of the continent, right above the ruins of Sutro Baths and the Pacific Ocean. Between bites, we decant a box from Bari Zaki in Chicago: a treasure trove of ribbon, much of it vintage, an array of Eurokraft envelopes, and some stellar origami seashells and temples. {This looty is part of a trade-in-progress for updates I’ve recently written for Bari’s B’Zaar. She’s also making deluxe boxes to house my new Monarch stationery and envelopes.}

Then we zip back to the Inner Richmond, to the studio of artist John Held, Jr., aka The Perforator. While John was living in Dallas, Texas, in 1987, he acquired a perforator from a print shop in Texarkana that was going out of business. John perforates his own artist postage stamps {artistamps} and artworks. He also perforates sheets for mail artists from all over the world {up to 50 sheets at no charge, keeping one of every ten sheets for his personal collection}. And check out his chads! “The perforations are ‘fallen chads,’ captured in a tray underneath the perforating comb. They are kept for sentimental purposes, becoming ‘relics’ of artistic projects past.” John perfs a few of Kim’s business cards on the bias as a souvenir. Read more about John and the Modern Realism Gallery & Archive here; inquire about his commercial perfing rates at (415) 831-5345.

We swoop by City Stamp & Sign to pick up my new rubber stamps. Doreen {left in photo} and Elaine open the display case for us. We also ogle other people’s stamps awaiting pick-up, including gigantic sans serifs for Graffeo Coffee and wonderful “wood blocks” for Muir Woods Trading Company, designed by Aaron Goldstein and Alyssa Teale at AMG Multimedia.

Now, to Atelier Gargoyle: a small establishment that is dedicated to the vanishing art of Handwritten Correspondence. That’s the first sentence on Linnea Lunquist and Ward Dunham’s superb website – where, under this tab, you will find eleven extremely precise, beautifully written “windows” into the world of sealing wax. I will allow myself only one more pun and say that both Linnea and Ward wax eloquent about the differences between melting your wax with a match and melting it with a little torch.

Atelier Gargoyle would be a gargantuan treat on its own… but Linnea and Ward have noteworthy suite neighbors with whom they share a common {but unique} parlor: book artist Rhiannon Alpers and bibliophilic dye-meister Rich Spelker. In Rhiannon’s studio, I notice tidy packets of Mohawk Superfine. She comments, “Superfine is what I made many of my first books from during my undergraduate and my graduate studies. Now I use it when I teach – for my bookbinding workshops at the San Francisco Center for the Book, and for my beginning letterpress students at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Every so often, I buy a carton of 80# text from The Paper Mill Store. They cut it to size for my various needs and wrap it.”

One final note about the ambiance on the third floor of what I will henceforth always think of as the Gargoplex. It’s also home, very sweet home, to Jasmine Rae Bakery, so the aroma in the stairwell gets more heavenly as you ascend.

Now, time for lunch at Zuni Café. As soon as we’ve ordered, I excuse Pam and Kim for some pre-prandial dessert at Bell’occhio. Seven minutes later, when our food arrives, I call Claudia Schwartz, Bell’occhio’s proprietress, and ask her to send the girls home for lunch! While we eat, Claudia wraps delicious packages… two of which turn out to be for Lucky Me. As for her tissue pom-poms of perfection, you too can have these cutting-edge scissors {giftwrapped with pompoms!}. Voilà.

Alyson Kuhn, the tour guide of Felt & Wire, can kuhnfirm that she drove slightly fewer than 15 miles on this wild ride.