Our name finds its roots in a story of jealousy, rivalry, the struggle for power... and the difference between reeds and leather.
The year was 150 BC, and the world had become more unified under Alexander the Great than ever before. It was an age where the pace of discovery and innovation was growing too quickly to be contained. An age where great civilizations were made on the strength of their knowledge... and on the size of their libraries.
At that time, most of the civilized world used papyrus as its writing material, and thereby the sole conduit of written information. Far superior to the competing technologies such as clay tablets (or for that matter, oral tradition), papyrus enjoyed a makeshift monopoly on the transmission of knowledge throughout the Mediterranean and Western Asia... as did its exclusive supplier, the great Egyptian Empire.
The sole source in all the world of the reed whose inner stem was soaked and beaten to form papyrus scrolls was the legendary city of Alexandria, capital of Egyptian civilization and home to the largest library in the ancient world, a library unrivaled in the breadth of its culture and learning.
Almost unrivaled, that is. For Alexander the Great had left behind two cities to serve as centers of culture in the ancient world. Alexandria was one. The other was a city in modern-day Turkey, on a hilltop sixteen miles from the Aegean Sea, a city by the name of Pergamon. Pergamon, too, had a great library, indicated by some ancient historians as containing as many as 200,000 scrolls, so many that they could not even be contained in a single building.
Too many, in other words, for the Egyptian emperor Ptolemy V. He ceased all sales of papyrus to Pergamon -- confident that to do so would bring the feverish growth of knowledge in that city to a grinding halt, and confident that he could thus preserve his city's status as the center of knowledge and home to innovation, and growth.
But knowledge represents only one half of innovation... for knowledge is nothing without creativity.
And while using leather for writing was nothing new, it was the creativity of Pergamon that gave birth to new techniques which enabled animal skins to be transformed into the leaves of parchment, or Pergamino, which were carefully and painstakingly sewn into the first books as we know them today. Delicate, tender, tasteful and profound, they could maintain good condition and retain ink for thousands of years, long outliving papyrus... and remaining a standard for learning, luxury, and class to this very day.
Fast forward to the 21st century; the spirit of Pergamon lives on through what we’d like to think of as the land of Pergamino. Your new home to luxurious, innovative greeting cards, fashion and everything that is quintessentially fabulous and feminine!
