Gift Certificate Information - direct lithography, lithograph, serigraph, silkscreen

About Us

Working as graphic designer and illustrator, we've lived within a km or two of our shop for most
of the past 12 years. Leslieville is a proud part of Toronto where long term residents and newcomers support their local restaurants and shops in a spirit that is part necessity and part community-building. Many residents have become our customers or have come in to wish us good luck. Your support in the development of this young business has been generous. Thank you!

As this is being written, the car and pedestrian traffic move back and forth in front of the window: home renovators taking a break, moms pushing strollers, well-dressed middle aged folks who are darting into Winkel, EyeSpy and Festoon while their cars risk ticketing, buskers loading their gear onto the streetcar, rough edged guys who look like they may be just out of, or about to return to, some kind of incarceration, fashionable ladies carrying colourful shopping bags, kids coming home from school.

In early 20th century Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona or Milan surely the street traffic couldn't have been much different than what you can see out the Telegramme window on a typical day.

The posters in the shop, a lot of which long ago stopped having the remotest practical advertising
function, were almost all wheat paste wonders once, printed on newsprint, slapped onto hoarding and brushed against by busy people like the ones in this neighbourhood, people getting on with their lives. While our silkscreens would look better in a nice spot in your living room than out in the rain, today you can also see compelling silkscreen posters on telephone poles and mailboxes from time to time, produced by largely anonymous, passionate artists.

Like the neighbourhood, we're getting to know some of our uncommon prints well, but regularly see details for the first time in lithographs and silkscreens we've looked at closely 50 or 100 times: a boat hidden in the foreground, a detail on a label of liquor, a lone anguished face in a crowd.

As we keep mentioning, a big part of the story of our prints are the hand crafted qualities that make them uncommon, and very quickly the mind wanders to the teams that laboured over each single piece. It's a kick to see customers come through the door, and watch these works of art, some months old, some a century old, cast a spell, make someone laugh, evoke a memory of a song or a vacation.

Our shop and our online site are inspired by the great artists who made the wonderful posters that make up our inventory. Over time, we plan to add new prints that don't fall under the umbrella of poster art, but share the same vitality and poignancy. We hope you make your own discoveries and reconnections, either in our shop, or in our soon-to-be-live online catalogue.

Regards, Ian and Laura.

(The poster) is a means of communication between the seller and the public - somewhat like a telegraph. The poster artist is like a telephone operator; he does not draft messages, he dispatches them. No one asks him what he thinks; all he is asked to do is to communicate clearly, powerfully and precisely.

A.M. CASSANDRE

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