Archivist Gallery was founded in 1994 by Sarah and William Allardice to offer the highest quality Letterpress printed cards and stationery.

Prior to running Archivist, Sarah had a career with a prominent British stationery brand while William arrived via a roundabout route through the design department of Wedgwood and sometime selling racehorses to people in Japan. However their vision was consistent—that Archivist would offer high quality letterpress products that never lose their sense of fun.

Sarah and William firmly believe that letterpress remains the best form of printing available and everyone at Archivist works hard to ensure it continues in its role as the unequivocal home of UK letterpress printing. As we hope our customers will already know, we are also committed to offering fabulous customer service. Over nearly two decades, we have realised that it’s only worth doing business if you’re going to be nice about it. Our products are timeless and can be found in some of the most prestigious of Britain’s retailers including Conran, Paperchase, Liberty, the V&A and the Natural History Museum. Our boxes of matches are an extension of the timeless appeal of our products as well as being a fun take on something ordinary and rather useful.

Archivist Gallery is a home-spun team of artisan printers who create beautiful products using letterpress – a technique of relief printing where the printer sets movable type and images into the bed of the press before inking it and setting the thing in motion.

This transfers ink from the type to the paper with outstanding results. Archivist Gallery use an ancient Heidelberg printing press to create beautiful cards and stationery not to mention a nice line in matchboxes. Their letterpress printwork is fun, colourful and full of texture that makes for treasured keepsakes that make beautiful gifts.

Letterpress is a process whereby inked blocks are physically pressed to paper. Thanks to the physical impression on the paper, letterpress can be crisper, more defined and far richer than standard modern printing via an offset litho press. With practice and experience letterpress is an exceptional way to produce fine typography and is one of the best ways of producing high quality print work and stationery. As a technique invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-1400s, it remains labor-intensive and something requiring a craftsman to get it right.

At the core of Archivist’s letterpress work is a fundamental belief that there are people out there with a discerning eye, and perhaps even a sense of fun, who will like the stuff we make as much as we do. Of course Archivist Gallery loves making it—and they hope this love comes through in every card, postcard or matchbox. While they sell their work, they are not a retail outfit so much as an artisan company keeping something great alive because they believe it’s still great enough to be worth keeping alive.

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