Duplex cotton letterpress: two colors of paper glued back-to-back

A duplex card is two separate sheets of cotton stock laminated together to make a single card twice the thickness. Which means you get one color on the front, a different color on the back, and — the whole reason to do it — a stripe of contrasting color visible on all four edges. On a white-cotton-fronts-black-cotton-back duplex, the black edge frames the card like a picture frame. On a colored duplex (cream and terracotta, cobalt and cream) the effect is even more graphic.

Letterpress on duplex cotton is our favorite premium specification, full stop. The stock is 32pt or 48pt total, which handles the deepest impression we can strike without punch-through. The color stripe on the edge is genuinely the reason to do it — it's the effect that makes people ask about the card before they even read it.

Considerations: duplex is more expensive than single-ply cotton at the same thickness because it's two full sheets, adhesive, and a press pass. It also can't be duplex-printed as one continuous process — the two halves are printed, then laminated. Which means the two colors of cotton have to be spec'd upfront, and you can't decide the back color after the front runs. We keep about a dozen duplex color pairings in stock; anything else is a special-order combination and we'll be honest with you about lead times.