Posted on November 28, 2011 by David Williams
The stories of post WWII England came to life through the brilliant work of Picture Post magazine photographers. There wasn’t a woman photographer among them until Grace Robertson’s work was published in 1948. Grace left school early and did not consider a photographic career until she had an experience that she has described as “seeing [...]
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Posted on September 2, 2011 by Mark Baldwin
The Borealis Press may have been the first card company to match quotations with photographs, but for at least a few thousand of years before the internet we humans have been using quotations to pass on wit and wisdom. Two parts of this interest us intensely. One is the misquote thing. Everybody knows, for example, [...]
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Posted on August 26, 2011 by Mark Baldwin
The first Borealis Press office was in Ellsworth, Maine, in the walk-in basement of a big red brick building that looked like a fire-house. It was a pleasant scene, two blocks in from Main Street, two blocks up from the Union River, in an old-fashioned neighborhood of frame houses and big trees. The quiet streets [...]
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Posted on June 21, 2011 by Mark Baldwin
You can Google plenty about Rudolph deHarak, and there’s at least one book on him in the works. This report is mostly about how Rudy walked into The Borealis Press and hijacked my graphic vision. And about what a guy he was. I didn’t know it when he walked in the door and started driving [...]
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Posted on June 21, 2011 by Mark Baldwin
This has nothing to do with greeting cards, but something to do with the kind of nutty do-it-yourself doggedness that started The Borealis Press, and, to a good degree, stays with us. The words below are part of an obituary I wrote about my friend Eliot Sweet. The carpenter and magazine writer referred to are [...]
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Posted on June 21, 2011 by Mark Baldwin
The Borealis Press started printing in 1990, but our press and techniques were the same as printers used for those lush European art books of the 1950s and 1960s. We made negatives with a room-size camera and printed three-, four-, even seven- and nine-color jobs one color at a time, on our Mielhe single-color press. [...]
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Posted on June 21, 2011 by Mark Baldwin
I don’t want to give away too many trade secrets (Borealis Press cards have been copied so shamelessly that it makes a person wonder . . .), but the look of the card is important to us and, we think, it’s important to you. We’re a bit ruthless about getting what we want. But what [...]
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Posted on June 21, 2011 by Mark Baldwin
Why are there so many animals on Borealis Press cards? Is it because these cats and dogs just look like they’re saying those things? No. It’s because we have heard actual recordings (both digital and tape) of these very cats and dogs reading from their favorite books or, in a few cases, quoting from memory. [...]
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