The stationery shop and engraver Papier Royal sits midway down the eastern gallery of the storied Palais-Royal, the cloistered luxury arcade in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. The store is new, but with its time-worn mosaic floors, ceiling hand-painted with a cloudy trompe-l’œil sky, custom oak shelving and signage, including a centuries-old coat of arms, it looks as though it’s always been there.
The boutique bears the signature approach of its founder, 51-year-old French-Moroccan creative director and serial entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami. The mastermind behind fragrance and beauty brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803 – which he revived with his wife, Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, in 2014 – has made a career out of building heritage-rooted institutions for contemporary customers. His creative agency Art Recherche Industrie worked with the fragrance brand Cire Trudon and the historic silverware house Christofle, but now he’s focused solely on his own projects. They include the Marais concept store Words Sounds Colors & Shapes and the brand Radical Media Archive, which preserves political posters and the underground press of the late 1960s and ’70s, publishes an anthology and sells subversive merch. “I don’t do ‘cool’, I do old-school,” grins Touhami. “I create institutions.”
With Papier Royal, he hopes to revive the dying art of printed correspondence. Touhami has been obsessed with typography for more than 30 years. The new boutique is a temple to his geekdom. To date, he and his studio have created 86 original fonts, drawing inspiration from tombstones, vintage movie posters and beyond. Papier Royal also reflects his taste for counterculture. “This is the resistance!” he says of his pushback against our increasingly online lives. “Here is the best quote from your interview,” he says, taking a dramatic pause. “Someone told me that in 20 years’ time, people won’t be writing by hand. I want to fight against that. I don’t think the past is better, but it’s certainly something to treasure.” With his trademark confidence, he says: “In 30 years, this shop will be the only one left in this gallery.”
Inside, bespoke shelves are lined with writing elements. Envelopes have been designed with flaps inspired by collar shapes: a 1970s spear point or the Claudine, a girlish Peter Pan style – an homage to Colette’s schoolgirl series. There are also writing instruments from around the world: rock-shaped crayons made of mineral pigments and beeswax from the Korean brand Oduj ej (a set of five pieces from €37); Penco bullet ballpoint pens (from €9); and Mitsubishi Fine-tipped Sign pens, from €4. There are also mechanical clutch lead holders from the historic Czech brand Koh-I-Noor Hardmuth (in multiple sizes, starting from €6). A range of pencils spans the entire scale of graphite grades, from 9H to 9B. “We have 20,” he declares with the glee of Wonka in his chocolate factory.
Customers can also choose from a wide array of illustrated postcards and A6 correspondence cards with pre-typed messages on the front. They span the passive-aggressive (a card to leave on a car critiquing someone’s parking) to the highly personal: a one-liner requesting a divorce. “I want cards to accompany every moment of your life,” Touhami says. There is also an on-site calligrapher who can compose and mail letters for you (using the store’s own postage stamps, created in collaboration with the French mail service). “Sending letters is the next level of luxury,” he says.
The bespoke business is the crown jewel. Customers can take their pick from more than 500 papers to create custom notepads and business cards, embossed by the on-site pendulum machine: a 19th-century, hand-operated stamping device wielded today by Touhami’s long-term collaborator, the print expert Benoist Dallay. Papier Royal, he says, is now the only printer in Europe to offer pendulum stamping (timbrage sur balancier), the traditional Parisian technique used for monograms, the decorative symbols used to personalise stationery.
“The precision is not possible with any other machine,” says Touhami, who has acquired three of them; two are in his atelier, in the suburb of Saint-Denis; one is at the shop. He has spent the past few years buying up legacy print businesses, their equipment and archives, including some 12,000 monograms spanning the past three centuries. “It was going to completely disappear, had we not acquired the business of its last practitioner and asked the retiring printer to train our master printer,” he says.
Papier Royal now has the local monopoly on these techniques – most stationery shops outsource their orders to them. I spy the designer Alessandro Michele’s monogram pinned to the cork boards that line the walls. I can’t make out the others, but Touhami teases: “We do all of Hollywood.”