Two new books  include spotlights on Lunalux. Our little shoppe is featured in the second edition of eat.shop twin cities, a guide to the best local shops and restaurants in Minneapolis and St. Paul. You’ll also find a few photos of our work in Impressive: Printmaking, Letterpress & Graphic Design, an overview of contemporary design in letterpress and screen printing. Lunalux was included in the original edition of eat.shop twin cities (published in 2007), and we are honored to have made the cut the second time around. Once again, the editorial staff did a top-notch job selecting the most interesting Minnesota-grown shops and eateries. The design of the book, the artistic photos of all the businesses, and even the quality of the paper it’s printed on, all help make this the most irresistible local guide, great for natives and newcomers alike. The book is available in the Lunalux studio store, along with eat.shop guides for many other major U.S. cities.

Impressive is more of a coffee table book, bursting with letterpress- and screen-printed eye candy. Designers from all over the world are included in the tome, with a focus on Europe and North America. The styles vary from crusty wood-type posters to polished business collateral to dreamy arty prints. The 200+ pages of images are studded with interviews with innovative printers (including Ben Levitz of Minneapolis’ own Studio On Fire). We particularly love the text-based posters of Douglas Wilson, and everything from Mike Burton (“The Cranky Pressman”). One of our thank-you cards is featured on page 15, while page 98 is devoted to a series of wood-type ice cream signs we printed for Izzy’s Ice Cream in St. Paul. We’re not carrying this book in our shoppe, but you should be able to find it at a giant bookstore near you.

Click on the images below for larger views of Lunalux pages in these books.

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.

original short: Lunalux from mn original on Vimeo.

Clear your calendars, pop some popcorn, and get ready to watch some letterpress action on your TV tonight. Twin Cities Public Television launched a new program last week called MN Original, which highlights the diverse arts community of our fair state. Tonight’s episode will include a segment about Lunalux! We spent a few hours filming with Mark Fischer and Chuck Olsen back in January, when the show was still just a glimmer in the production staff’s eye. So we’re excited to see what they’ve put together for broadcast. To whet your appetite, they’ve created this video short in which the sounds of our Heidelberg Windmill mingle with the music of Savage Aural Hotbed. The show airs at 7:30 p.m. tonight (that’s Thursday, April 29) on TPT, and there are a few rebroadcasts scheduled throughout the coming week. The full episode will also be posted on the show’s website, mnoriginal.org

Lunalux owner Jenni Undis is featured in the latest edition of Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, in the column People Who Do Cool Things. Look for the interview and a smattering of photos on page 60 of the February 2010 issue. The magazine is on newsstands now, and the story should be available on the MSP Magazine website sometime soon. But for now, you’ll just have to read it here. And in Small World News, the photos were taken by Stephanie Colgan, who we worked with back in 2007 on business stationery. Click here to read about the work we did for Stephanie.

A Target catalog arrived in my mailbox recently. I have a love/hate thing for this mega-store. It’s a great source for cheap stuff, and as a Minnesotan I’m mildly proud of the local corporation’s endless expansion. But as the owner of a small, independent business, I think of Target as the Big Bad Retail Wolf, guiltlessly trying to devour everything in sight, including me. So imagine my surprise/delight/horror when I discovered a Lunalux card being used as a prop in Target’s holiday catalog! On page 45 there’s a handsome wooden charging station, its bottom drawer open just enough to expose a secret stash of stationery. See the red and white card peeking out? That’s a limited-edition Lunalux holiday card. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the picture in this blog post, from when we made the cards two years ago. We don’t get paid for this sort of thing, or even get credit anywhere in the catalog. But it’s the kind of exposure that would make my mom believe that I am Very Successful, and for that I am grateful.