About BookWear

BookWear® is creative and unique. So is the staff here. It’s a dedicated group. Most have worked with BookWear for 10 or more years, making funny little books with a great variety of stories, themes and images. It’s fun because we connect with art departments from 650 colleges, 150 hospitals and hundreds of non-profits, corporations and individuals. The final product is truly “novel”.

large screenprinting machines at bookwear headquarters

Our Story

People ask, “How did you invent BookWear®?” It’s tempting to answer, “It came from a revelation in the middle of the night.” But the truth is it was an evolution, not an epiphany. We’ve been graphic designers and printers for 35+ years and during that time have experimented with many processes, images and materials. In 1996 a sales rep from Maine said if we produced compressed shirts for him he would “sell thousands of them”. Necessity being mother of invention, (or in this case financial incentive being the mother), we developed a process of compressing printed shirts into little bricks of cotton. True to his word our rep sold thousands in the shapes of postcards, lobsters and lighthouses (good Maine icons, eh?). The leap to the book was inspired by our years of work with literary designs and libraries. “Hey, we could make this look like a book” was the opening line of experimenting that led to two patents and hundreds of thousands of little “books” that tell the stories of hospitals, nonprofits, schools and corporations in a surprising, fun and effective way.