Serious Books and Stationery
Pedantics is the inaugural project of Vantucky Book and Press, founded in 2019 by Wintermute Grey and Emily A.F. García. We make serious journals and stationery for serious people. Well, people who are serious about the paper they write on. Or, if you prefer, the paper on which they write. Does that sound better? With a serious shop name like Pedantics, we should probably start following rules like the one about not ending a sentence with a preposition. Actually we're on the fence about the preposition thing, and there's quite a lot we don't take seriously. We promise to take you seriously, though. To your face, anyway.
Ahem.
Here's a little information about who we are and what we do:
Winter and Emily started hanging out at EmSpace in Portland in 2013. They both had some prior training in bookmaking, and they cemented their friendship during a 2-week Old Ways of Making Books workshop with Jim Croft and Melody Eckroth in 2016. They started sharing a studio space in 2017, and finally got their act together and started working on Pedantics in 2019 (probably not coincidentally after another Old Ways workshop).
Pedantics brings together traditional processes (hand binding! letterpress printing!), antique tools (cast iron presses! manual paper cutters! bone tools!), some pretty nifty modern technology (photopolymer plates! interwebs!) and whatever aesthetic we happen to be excited about this week.
For a couple of important reasons, a lot of what you see in our shop will be limited to a single edition. First, we made an Unbreakable Vow that we would only make things that we are excited about making and using. If we really love something, we may make it again, but Pedantics is—despite or maybe because of the seriousness of purpose we bring to our craft—our playground for experiments and risks. Second, we use salvaged or recycled paper and other materials whenever practical. We think that's good business as well as good environmental stewardship. The printing and binding industries produce A LOT of waste, and that weighs on us. So we may get a single box of some really awesome paper that happens to be a leftover from someone else's job. When it's gone, it's gone.
In a society that incentivizes fast, cheap, and disposable, we find ourselves more and more drawn to making things slowly, thoughtfully, and well. We're not outwardly religious people, but this is how we pray.
