Thornwillow letterpress is so good you'll hang up the phone on your husband too

I was talking on the phone to my husband late last night (he's in business school in Philadelphia right now), and absentmindedly clicking through sites for decorative papers at the same time. Clicking onto Thornwillow, I suddenly stopped, unable to talk. I started to stutter. "Oh my! oh my!" I gasped. "I'm looking at a letterpress online that is really good. No: I mean, Really Good! Let's talk later! Bye!"

Check out a sampling of the custom monograms they offer-- almost as nuanced and as unusual as those offered by Leontine Linens...



The great thing about Thornwillow Press (other than the fact that Cynthia Kling, the woman who gave Domino the name "Domino," has praised them to the high heavens in Vanity Fair's July 2009 ed, I discovered today) is that they balance a lot of tricky extremes.

a) They do the "Letterpress Is Posh" thing oh so effortlessly... (love that lion like nobody's business)

b) They do the wry, tongue-in-cheek, ironic, "Letterpress can be Naughty" thing well too....(love their "spanking babies" set of note cards)...


c) & then, best of all, they do lots of OTHER things too-- charming things that are actually charming, (vs the too-gooey, the too-treacly, the too-sweet). I guess the best way to describe Thornwillow is that they seem to have been designed by someone who lives in a Sempé cartoon, and whose life is half-lived in tails, giving toasts--


and the other half, lived at the circus--


or in dreamy, teetering castles of books, shared with friends, in the air.