Reg Lissel, Papermaker

A collection of Reg Lissel’s handmade papers, with brief commentaries by him and the printer

In 1995 Reg Lissel closed the Vancouver bookshop he’d run for over a decade and focused exclusively on his new-found passion, papermaking. Over the next 20 years he made a wide range of papers from a variety of fibers, from the mundane (straw) to the exotic (red cedar bark). He made paste papers, pulp paintings and decorative boxes. And around 2003 he began what would be a five-year project with HM, to make a white cotton (rag) sheet that would be perfect for printing text. He went on to provide thousands of beautiful white sheets for a number of HM projects.

In 2013 Reg lost his studio space, and decided he was ready to retire. HM purchased most of the sheets he still had on hand, most of them random batches of 20 or so sheets made from various fibers (primarily cotton but often with one or more other fibers blended in), in various colors. The intention had always been to use the sheets for some kind of record or retrospective of his work, it just took a decade to figure out the details.

The variety and quantities of papers available in this collection worked out to make 20 sets, each with the same number of samples. Most of the sheets are 13 × 18 inches, and presented as folios (i.e. folded); a few sheets in short supply are presented as single leaves. Reg contributed brief commentaries about the stages of papermaking, from choosing fibers through beating, forming and drying. HM wrote a brief introduction and note about the ongoing collaboration with Reg to perfect a white sheet for printing damp. These short texts are printed on the front recto of different sheets in the collection, leaving the inside and rear verso blank (i.e. just to be clear, about half the sheets have some text printed on the first recto, the other half have just the sheet’s fiber listed; other than that, there there are a lot of blank pages). The sheets are presented loose, in a clamshell box, to allow for each to be held and closely examined.

Each set has 23 different sheets, although which 23 sheets will vary from set to set. The text has been set in Optima with Huxley Vertical for display. Most of the sheets were dampened for printing. The colophons were press-numbered and signed by Reg. The boxes were made at HM, using four different colors of Japanese cloth, with painted paper for the trays. Of the 20 sets, 18 are offered for sale (the other two are for HM and RL). At the time of issue, nine remain available. The price is Cdn$700 (US$500), less 20% for orders received by April 15, 2026.