CARTA PURA - Simply good paper

How do you recognize a CARTA PURA product? Not at first glance, through eye-catching packaging or striking labels, but mostly at second glance, after your eyes have recognized a special colour harmony, after your hands have registered a precisely made book edge or after you have run your fingers over the smoothly calendered paper surface. Once people become sensitive to these features and recognize the quality by means of their senses they are hooked on our cases and boxes, books and diaries, albums and blocks, Leporelli and cards.

 

CARTA PURA products convey a strong passion for colour, form and material, as the staff members themselves design the products after long years of working daily with the matter paper. We have literally captured the notion of the material and can develop a new design by means of this experience. Sometimes we discover a paper with a very specific character, that inspires us to produce something with it. This was the case with the Japanese Satogami which we are using as cover material for note books and boxes. At one point we could not find any good elastic band folder in the wide world of paper products, so we had to produce our own.

 

In order to maintain high quality for our productions one has to be quite persistent. From the initial idea and material tests until the release of a finished product many months, sometimes years pass by. And even if the product satisfies our own standards and finally also the customer's demand, it does not go without saying that the next production runs automatically. Suddenly a paper is no longer produced in the same quality or the maker had to buy a new machine which is not appropriate for our needs anymore. Therefore we constantly have to reinvent our products to keep them at the same standard. All CARTA PURA items are „Made in Germany“, most of them are manufactured in Munich or nearby.

 

Unfortunately, some succesful CARTA PURA products have been copied, like for example our folder called „A-Mappe“. At first sight these imitations look very similar to our product, however as far as the material and manufacturing is concerned, it is evident that the copy was made for a higher profit at the expense of quality. Thus our quality is our best copyright and we are glad to have demanding and experienced customers.

 

When regarding the products individually, the screw post albums are amongst our most long-established items, as they were introduced nearly 25 years ago. The highly calendered black board and the covered screw post border are characteristic of CARTA PURA quality.

 

Bestsellers are the two folders for A4, available in many colours. For the „A-Mappe“ we use the heavy weight Murillo board with felt mark surface. The „V-Mappe“ is made out of the strongly calendered pressboard paper. Since 2012 there is a third group of folders with coloured elastic bands made out of a dark grey recycling board. These folders are available not only in A4, but also in the smaller sizes A5 and A6, thus being perfect portfolios for all kinds of postcards, paper snippets or the like.

 

Another important section is the production of boxes: Amongst those are the box sets covered with Carta Varese and Chiyogami and the hand-made single boxes with different kind of closing mechanisms: the cassette for A4, the square box and the small pencil case. The brown boxes which we use for packing our products have become a very good selling line in the past years. Meanwhile we offer more than 30 different sizes, useful for packing and display purposes.

 

Concerning the blocks we stock many variations, part of them being established classics of our assortment like the drawing block with orange cover and Magnani paper, and part of them being newly developed items like the Rivoli block, made out of our exclusive Rivoli paper in five colours.

 

We stock two different kinds of stitched books: First the sketch or guest books covered by English bookcloth with "Carta pura" paper inside, second, the ruled note books with colour edge, covered with black Satogami paper.

 

Photo albums are sometimes too big and heavy if you only want a few well-presented photos. In this case, just use our Leporelli: either those with black paper and flexible Murillo cover or those with off-white paper and hard cover decorated by colourful Japanese Katazome papers.

 

The production of a diary has been one of our most recent projects. The do-it-yourself calendar, printed on Tiziano paper, has been in our assortment for a long time, but the weekly book planer was first introduced in 2010. We decided to print it only in German and not bilingual to keep the layout very clear and reduced. There is plenty of space to note appointments and to make small sketches or write a journal. As the chronology of days and months is evident the diary should also be useful for non German speakers: We consider typography an international language.

 

CARTA PURA develops, manufactures and sells greetings cards. There are two main groups: those showing original wood cuts in one or two colours with motifs reflecting occasions like Christmas, wedding, dinner and many more. These cards are designed and printed by our wood cut artist. The so-called Chiyogami double cards have a square piece of real Chiyogami paper on top. They became very popular, promoting our range of hand-made Chiyogami papers throughout Europe. We have inspired many more designers to do similar card productions with Japanese patterns. The base paper for all these cards is our Rivoli, with a quality also estimated by other card producers.