How were the book Poustras created?

You know how every business book says you shouldn't mix things up? Supposedly Keep it simple stupid. This is mostly good advice. But this is not the case with our products. And not at all with the book Poustroch.

It was a nice idea in the beginning.

Let's add a text partner to the mountain Poustra . And if we can help another non-profit along the way, that will be a great bonus.

But what to get into? We immediately dismissed the motivational quotes. And we agreed to reach for wisdom from books .

And since books = Martinus, we agreed to meet at their place. They liked the idea, but something was missing. And we left the meeting with the first NO.

It wouldn't be us to stop it

First, we thought about printing technology. We could print the posters digitally. Or screen printing like mountain Poustre.

But that wouldn't be it. As long as the former has no added value, the latter would teach us nothing. And Risomat already has Black Holes, so we didn't want to make a fool of ourselves.

Ivan immersed himself in research and came back with a solution — letterpress. And not just any. A hundred years old. They have it in Pressink in Nová Cvernovka. And it copies Guttenberg's original invention from 500 years ago.

And what's best — Martinus approves.

Your own font box? Why not just design your own?

We ran into an unexpected problem with letterpress. We missed the Slovak cash register. So they had some writing in Pressink. But it would be too short for some book summaries.

And since we were going to have our own typeface made, why not the entire font? So we invited Ondrej Jób from SetupType to the team.

We thought it would be a quickie. A few weeks, Hangouts and 77 email conversations later (!!) The Font was born.

The font, which follows on from the Bauhaus art school and has no equal in our country with its geometric diacritics.

It is sad that all traditional font manufacturers have already gone bankrupt in Slovakia. Fortunately, we found some in Romania. And it turned out great.

There is no saving on the material

While printing technology was initially largely unknown to us, we were clear about one thing from the very beginning — no saving on material.

That's why we once again reached out to a proven paper supplier, the Italian Fedrigoni. We already know their papers, so we didn't have to choose from 50 or so samples like with Žurnáli.

It was enough to choose from their highest quality Woodstock line and point to the highest weight. And when we finally held the paper in our hands after a month of waiting caused by the corona, we could only say an appreciative WOW.

Otherwise, did you notice the small inscription in the lower left corner? So we print it together with the back side in Brno, from where we take the papers. Only then do the posters travel to Nova Cvernovka.

It still lacked something...

They knew it in Martinus. And we felt it too. The posters still lacked something.

Illustrations.

With a similar logic to the first choice of technology, we ruled out all alternatives until we were left with linocut.

We feared him like the devil of holy water. After all, Ivan only remembers a lot of ink and dirty hands up to the elbows from his school days.

Fortunately, there are people who do this professionally. For example, Martin Malina from Ateliér Perinbaba. And they were willing to help us with it.

So we took the illustrations prepared by Ema Stolicna and transferred them into a stylized form. After that, Martin engraved the template with special chisels and the graphics were printed with a hand press.

That's not all...

I have not yet written about the fact that Poustra must dry between each step. Sometimes even three days.

The capacity in the dryer is limited and therefore only the final production phase lasts almost a week.

At the end, the Poustra are packed in a tube, we attach an insert and a sticker to them, and they travel to two places — to Martinus and to our warehouse.

It's a small miracle that you can view them online

Knižné Poustra taught us a lot in the 3 months since we decided to go for it.

☑️ We found out how a custom font is developed

☑️ What is it like to deal with the cash register in Romania

☑️ How to work on a century-old letterpress

☑️ That linocut is not just something that I got confused about in art class and couldn't put it down for 3 days

Maybe they didn't sell out in 6 hours like Bystra's last poster. But they are quite possibly my favorite product. And also a reminder that where there's a will, there's a way.