With yesterday’s mailing of bills and thank-you notes, we used the last of our Expressionist stamps and thus cleaned out our stamp stash. This necessitated a visit to one of our favorite places – the Stamp Shoppe at the main post office in Downtown Minneapolis. We love this sprawling Art Deco building, but even more we love the little stamps-only storefront inside, with its striped awning and unparalleled postage selection. Philatelists frequent the Stamp Shoppe for obscurities like first-day-of-issue postmarks; we say it’s the go-to source for anyone in search of Just The Right Stamp for a special mailing. Because the Stamp Shoppe don’t handle many standard post-office transactions, there’s rarely a wait and the employees are cheerful and chatty. On this visit, we stocked up on newish first-class stamps, Priority Mail stamps, 2-ounce stamps, and assorted small denominations. Now we’re ready to mail anything!

The Stamp Shoppe is located inside the main branch of the Minneapolis post office, on First Street South (click here for full address and directions). The Stamp Shoppe is only open weekdays 9a.m.-5p.m., and it closes for a bit each day around lunch.

We’re looking forward to another busy Stationery Saturday this weekend. What will we be printing, you ask? Personalized letter sheets! June 19, customers can choose from four designs: gold fleur de lis, silver moon, red book and blue ship. Pick your favorite or a combination of all four; we’ll print 10 sheets while you wait, for a measly $29. Depending on when you show up, the waiting might be 10 minutes or it might be an hour. You can use this time to learn a little about letterpress (follow us through the steps of pulling the type, setting up the printing form and running our antique press) or do a little shopping while we do the dirty work. We have lots of clever Father’s Day and Graduation cards in stock, and we just received a shipment of Field Notes notebooks that we think are going to fly off the shelves! You might even duck outside for a lap around Loring Park, or stroll down our recently revitalized cobblestone alley.

We are thrilled that Stationery Saturday has been growing in popularity over recent months. In June, we actually ran out of the two most popular designs with a couple of hours to spare in the day. So for maximum selection, you should think about coming earlier than later. As always, we’ll have coffee and homemade cookies for you to nibble. We hope you can stop by! And if you have any Paper Addict friends, be sure to tell them about it too (you can even invite them to the event on Facebook).

Visit our Stationery Saturdays page for more details about the event; to see a schedule of dates for the rest of 2010; and to see what we’ve got planned for next time. Special thanks to letoilemagazine.com for featuring Stationery Saturday in this week’s roundup of the best sales and retail events in the Twin Cities.

Photographer Josh Hackney came to Lunlaux with an existing logo for his business, and asked us to develop a memorable tag/business card. We agreed right away that the composition should be very simple, and the wow factor would come from the use of  luxurious materials. So we printed these jumbo cards (they’re 2.5×3.5 inches, instead of the standard 2×3.5 inch business card format) on super-thick 220# Lettra cotton cover. The perfect shade of pale blue-green ink (we decided to call it Sea Glass) looks dreamy on the slightly textured bright white stock. The card is so thick that when you hold it in your hand, you can’t help but really pay attention, to turn it over and study the way the type bites into the paper. It’s in that moment that the best detail catches your eye: painted edges. We’ve only recently started to offer edging service, and this is our favorite deployment of the process yet. Edging works best on the thickest of stocks, where you can really see the color. The cards were gorgeous before we did the edging; the last little touch of color really outs it over the edge though! We drilled tiny holes in most of the cards, so they could be attached to his new bags with lovely grosgrain ribbon, but some were left intact to be used as business cards. The business stationery package was rounded out with correspondence cards and coordinating envelopes.

Are you considering adding a little letterpress to your business collateral collection? You can read more abut our design and letterpress services for business stationery in the custom section of our website. You can also browse our blog archives to read about other business stationery projects we’ve worked on in the past.