Papeterie St-Gilles

St-Gilles is a papeterie located in Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive, in the Charlevoix region of Québec. They have a very limited product line of decorative and artistic papers made on-site in their small workshop. Many of their papers are made with the petals of local flowers embedded into the grain, and they all are heavy weight and super smooth for artisanal cotton papers.

I’ve used St-Gilles papers for both writing and as notebook covers. They are a little too thick for the volumous tomes I tend to write to my penpals, but are sold in lovely letter sets by Papeterie Casse-Noisette in Old Montréal.

St-Gilles also sells a selection of works by various Québec artists in their boutique. The biggest part of this selection includes prints of artist work on house-made paper, as well as original artist works.

One thing that caught my eye whilst perusing their site last was this lovely stamp set by Coralie Bickford-Smith, an English book binding designer. Although the set was made in China and the designer based in England, I grabbed it simply for the clean and simple style of the stamps, which I can’t wait to put to use in my letters and journals.

I recommend St-Gilles for casual letter-writers. Their papers hold up very well to fountain pen, contrary to my experience with similar cotton papers from St-Armand. I also recommend picking up some of the art prints from their boutique, and of course maybe one of the notebooks from my shop made with their papers!