Terrapin Stationers

“At one time, in one building in downtown Manhattan, there were probably twenty-five engravers,” says Ted Harrington of Terrapin Stationers & Engraving Co.. “Now there’s two left making engraved dies in all of Manhattan—my dad and his best friend. Most of the shops either closed down or moved out of town—outside of Manhattan.”

Ted’s dad is, in fact, retired now, but he’ll still do some engraving work now and again for select clients. The old-fashioned, hand-engraved stationery created by Terrapin Stationers & Engraving Co. is a thing of beauty, an item we’re especially proud to carry at Haberdash EDC.

Inside Stationers Engraving & Printing Co. via A Continuous Lean

According to Ted, the business first started with a Russian engraver who came over to the States after the Revolution, and began working for a cousin who owned a little press in downtown Manhattan. “There he learned to engrave dies, which we still use today to stamp our work,” says Ted. “His children took over the company when he passed away, and my father was their engraver [since he was 14]. We took it over as they got older and retired, years and years ago.” Ted’s also been in the business since he was a teenager.

Q: Did you always know you’d end up in the family business?

“I’ve always been in this business, on and off, in and out of school, and eventually came into it at the end of the 80s. I got into sales for a few years, and got some experience which was great. I think in family businesses it’s really important for children and siblings to get out there and try to work for another company before you end up in the family business. But it’s always something that I’ve enjoyed. I like the pace, and I like being able to work with cool people. This gives me an opportunity to be creative and be involved with decision-makers.”

Q: Why aren’t companies engraving anymore?

“It takes time, it’s tedious, and it’s not inexpensive. The thing about all the new technology is that you can run six colors on a digital press and get it done in two hours. We can only run one color at a time, so with the flies, for example (below), each color is put on in a separate impression, by hand, on a press that’s probably around 120 years old. All of our presses are hand-fed, done with pins and sealing wax. There’s no new technology, we’re still doing it the same way it’s always been done.”

Q: Where did the fly fishing motif come from?

“My dad’s a fisherman, an avid sportsman, always has been, and one year I bought him a book on the founder of Orvis, and he was inspired. About twenty years ago he started making these fly dies, and got excited about it, and they were sitting there for years. And then about a year ago I started to look at them and saying we should do something with this stuff, and that’s kind of how this reinvention started.”

Q: How did this reinvention begin?

“We’ve been servicing companies forever: law firms, investment banking firms, fashion companies and PR firms. We never really had our own product; we’d always worked directly for corporations. It kind of began with me, my friends, my blogger friends, other guys that I hang around—we thought it would be fun to have an engraved ‘Fuck Off’ card, sort of that American Psycho idea.” Watch video.

“I started making the WTF cards when the economy fell apart. I wanted to get some attention, so I made those and I sent them out in envelopes that I hand-lined with a copy of the financial section of the New York Post. I sent them to everybody I knew, and that’s where that started. Those cards were also sitting around for the last year and a half. Then, I did Pop Up Flea with Michael Williams (A Continuous Lean) and Randy Goldberg (Urban Daddy), and I needed some product, so we brought the flies and [the WTF cards]. From there, it grew to FTW, Fuck Off, the little do-it-yourself Twitter cards… We’re having fun and making it up as we go along.”

Q: How did Terrapin Stationers get its name? “This is a really weird story. In 1993, I had an opportunity to do a line of stationery for Jerry Garcia with his artwork, and I had the name Terrapin Stationers. We had pitched it, and they loved it, but Jerry passed away a year later. That name sat around for about six years, and then in ’99, I just pulled it out and said, ‘Let’s keep Stationers Engraving here, and I want to do this.’ And so I started Terrapin.” “We’re all together still (Stationers Engraving Co. and Terrapin), but I just wanted to have my own identity within the company. If you were to call the company, they’d answer ‘Stationers Engraving Company,’ so I wasn’t really changing much by throwing the Terrapin in front of that.”

Q: What’s next for Terrapin?

Final thoughts on steel die engraving…

“We are still at the top of the food chain in terms of our quality. It’s the best, out of everything. And the nice thing about what we’re doing now, what Terrapin has been doing, is that it’s an opportunity for people to own engraved stationery for a pretty reasonable price. To have a set of engraved notecards for $20—no one’s doing that.”