One has fair hair, and the other has dark, but otherwise Rebecca Dolen and Brandy Fedoruk could be two of the Bennet sisters (the sensible, not the flighty, ones) in Pride and Prejudice. Their demeanour is modest, even blushingly shy, and they have near identical handwriting, small but perfectly formed, a notable skill in a world where putting words directly on paper is a dying art. Rather than the McCommunication of texting and e-mails, and the blogarrhea pandemic, the two advocate slower meetings of minds, preferring and promoting the permanent art of writing by hand to the transitory rearrangement of pixels.
Mind you, they do use a few technological tools. Their Web site (www.assemblyoftext.com/) reveals that they are founders and "partial presidents" of the Regional Assembly of Text (3934 Main Street), a store/gallery/meeting place devoted to handcrafted words, and they use Photoshop to tinker around with the vintage images that they transfer to paper and cloth. But otherwise, their oasis is an engaging chunk of the past. The wall behind the counter is entirely made of filing cabinets: large, small, three-drawer, four-drawer, black, grey, beige, and green-grey. Collected from antiques and thrift stores, they hide correspondence, clippings, and a great deal of paper. Manual and electric typewriters line up on shelves below the counter. Take a peek at the little portable green-keyed Hermes Rocket. Cute or what? "Some kids come in here and they don't know what they are," says Fedoruk. "One kid said, 'Oh wow, it comes out right on the paper.'" Immediate gratification is only one advantage, she feels, of paper over screen: "You can lose things on the computer."
Emily Carr grads, class of 2003, Dolen and Fedoruk collaborated on exhibits of handmade books before conceiving the notion of a shop devoted to print. Says Dolen: "It didn't seem such a jump for us…that we were going against any trend in technology." A year's discussion led to six months of organization. "We knew we wanted to be on Main Street, no question," says Fedoruk of the hunt that eventually led to a space that had been home successively to a U-brew and a jeans store. Attacking the "Pepto-Bismol-pink" décor, they painted the beat-up floor chocolate brown and the walls the cream of good notepaper, and installed fixtures from an old school on Vancouver Island. They brainstormed names for a long time. "We wanted it to reflect the old-fashioned feel," Fedoruk says.
They make almost all of the things they sell: notepaper, gift boxes screened with individual letters, gift-wrap featuring vintage equine images or celestial maps or moose heads, T-shirts, alphabet magnets, and quilted letters (a big hit as baby gifts). The store brims with serendipitous pleasures, including the lowercase gallery, undeniably the city's smallest, which houses suitably petite exhibits and four under-counter drawers that conceal other works by local artists; see, or rather make, the peanuts dance at the "Peanut Party"; check out "Mr. Baldy" in his Styrofoam surroundings.
You're welcome to sit down and scribble away in the Writing Nook, stamping your letters with date and initial. The typewriter on the coffee table in front of the sofa is also for customers' use. Monthly sessions of the Letter Writing Club are open to all, with Dolen and Fedoruk providing typewriters, paper, tea, cookies, and encouragement for the 30 or so scribes (ages 18 to 60) who usually show up. A field trip to the main Canada Post office downtown is in the offing.
"It takes more time to write a letter; more thought is involved," Fedoruk says. "Nobody ever prints out an e-mail and keeps it." Both she and Dolen are fervent journal keepers and letter writers and, like most wordsmiths, are persnickety about their tools. Dolen is obsessed with the Pilot G Tech 4, which she calls "the best pen ever made". How many letters do they personally receive? "Not enough"-although, she adds, "we get more and more letters to the store." One held a press clipping recounting bygone days when New York had five daily postal deliveries.
Both are nuts about vintage stationery, bringing out a box of mint-condition Wilson Jones ledger sheets in buff printed with red and blue lines that they recently unearthed at a Goodwill store in Bellingham. On vacation in Mexico, it was "to heck with the beach, [let's go to] stationery stores," Dolen says. Even though, to their dismay, all stock there is stored behind the counter and cannot be riffled through or fondled, they returned with prizes such as airmail envelopes edged in red and green (rather than the usual blue) stripes. Join their Book Club ($50) or Button Club ($32) and a small handmade book or button arrives in your mail each month for a year.
Spending time at the Regional Assembly of Text is almost certain to ignite the urge to put pen to paper. Start by mailing a card that reads "I have been meaning to write to you for a very long time. Please forgive me," and take it from there.
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