Global brand Hartley & Marks has expanded its product repertoire to include an exciting new range of notebooks. The power behind the iconic Paperblanks brand, which has an ever-growing worldwide dedicated fan base, Hartley & Marks has a long history of publishing and bookbinding; Paper-Oh expands upon this existing knowledge to produce a product that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
The brand, which has been in development for several years, has recently been trialled in Germany and is now ready to be launched to the UK market. Sarah White, European Marketing & PR Manager at Hartley & Marks sums up the ethos of the Paper-Oh brand: “Everything we create is the result of our passion for the art of bookbinding and our desire to push the limits of what people expect from a notebook”.
A collaborative effort between designers Nadine Werner and Wade Berridge, Nadine describes how some of the Paper-Oh designs were inspired: “For the Circulo and Quadro series we started with the material, I found the perforated card and the thin round and square magnets, then we developed the idea from there. I attended a bookbinding school in Ascona, Switzerland, where I learned a technique to score between card boards and it was this method that we used in creating our Puro design. The Yuko-Ori notebooks are inspired by the origami and origata of Japanese artist Yuko Nishimura. A lot of my ideas start off in my head and are inspired by going for walks and studying nature and looking at the world around me.”
Wade explains what he feels are the standout features of Paper-Oh notebooks: “For me it is how tactile and flexible the notebooks are, I like books that bend. These books are designed ultimately to be functional. One of the standout features is the sophisticated lie-flat binding technique and also the 3D perforations in the Circulo and Quadro series are like nothing else out on the market. Many of the features of Paper-Oh notebooks are not easy to mass-produce, but we've gone to extra lengths to offer what are typically one-of-a-kind notebooks to a large audience.”
The Paper-Oh collections are popular among young, design-oriented people, both male and female, although Wade envisages the designs appealing to anyone from businessmen to sophisticates and naturalists. Paper-Oh notebooks are designed to celebrate the fact that they will become altered over time. Sarah White comments, “Paper-Oh encompasses the overall ethos of Hartley & Marks which is to make the ordinary extraordinary. We look forward to seeing the brand grow and evolve in the years to come.”
