青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Our boxes take shape thanks to the help of handwork by craftspeople around the world. Every single sheet of paper bears the traces of the crafter’s hands and mind—traces that can never be mimicked by machine.

——from the afterword

Box & Needle, founded in the suburbs of Tokyo by a small Kyoto papercraft studio, sells cardboard boxes covered with decorative paper from around the world. This treasury presents enchanting designs by the paper suppliers with whom Box & Needle has worked over the years, including the venerable Rossi 1931 and Il Papiro in Italy, the renowned Finnish wallpaper manufacturer Pihlgren & Ritola, and studios in Nepal; it also features patterns developed by the store in collaboration with outside creatives.

These days, paper is increasingly ceding ground to digital and other replacements. The appeal of time-honored designs that have nevertheless endured each in its own locale, the enticement of new designs born for today, and paper products that marry those designs with artisanal skill—all are on ample display in this book, which also conveys the spirit of the people behind the making of paper and paper boxes.

Featured (in order of appearance)
(Italy) Il Papiro, Giannini, Istituto Fotocromo Italiano, Grafiche Tassotti, Rossi 1931
(Germany) Carta Pura
(United Kingdom) Judd Street Gallery Pattern Papers, Pollock’s Toy Museum
(Finland) Pihlgren & Ritola
(Nepal) Gifted Hands
(Nepal & France) Lamali
(Nepal & Germany) Tudi Billo
Box & Needle custom designs by Aoi Huber, Konomi Honda, Johanna Gullichsen, Veronica Halim

Kyoko Onishi was born in 1954 in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, and educated at Ritsumeikan University. She taught English at the Osaka YMCA Language Center Tosabori School before opening her own school, 351ELC, in the Yamashina district of Kyoto in 1992. She joined the Marushige Shiki box-making studio in 1997 and has served as a paper buyer for the Box & Needle brand and boutique since its founding by Marushige in 2009.

Kyoto native Keiko Onishi began her career at a museum, where her responsibilities included organizing workshops and developing assistive tools. She launched the Box & Needle brand and boutique through her family’s box-making studio, Marushige Shiki, in 2009. As CEO of Box & Needle, she develops custom-designed paper in collaboration with creatives in and outside Japan and holds box-decorating workshops around the world in an effort to pass on the skills of the craft to the next generation. She is the author of Box & You (BNN Shinsha, 2012) and Kiru haru tsukuru hako no hon (Cutting, Pasting, and Crafting Boxes; Mynavi Publishing, 2015).