Neenah Paper - A letter from monster camp.

Do you remember practicing your writing in grammar school, and they gave you those pads of grey paper with the blue ruled lines on it? You know, where you had a dotted line to help you make your lower-case letters exactly half the height of your upper-case ones? That was cheap paper, made mostly of wood pulp. Neenah Paper Company wants you to hate cheap paper.

No problem. The one thing I remember about that horrible stuff is that if you had to erase, either your mark would become a huge black smear, or the paper would simply fall apart and tear to pieces. Good times. That taught me to hate shitty paper forever.

In high school, I became familiar with Strathmore Bristol papers, which have a high percentage of cotton rag in them. Cotton fibers are much longer than wood pulp fibers, so the paper is stronger, and can stand up to being erased a few times without wearing away as if you were erasing your mistake with an orbital sander. Bristol paper is wonderful stuff. I assume this Neenah stuff is similar.

This ad is from 1936, which was a bit of a golden era of Art Deco style. That being said,  I have to admit that here we have one example of that rarest of all things - ugly deco.

If Guillermo Del Toro made a movie about The Ghost of Timely Correspondence, this is what it would look like. The thing has a pen growing out of it's frikkin eye socket, but it still has to use it's hand to guide the pen. If I had a pan-for-an-eye, I would at least hope that I could use it to write no-handed. And is that wiggly stuff around the edges supposed to be his hair? HER hair maybe? This scary pen monster doesn't make me want to reconsider my paper supplier, but it may motivate a letter to the editor, written on high quality Neenah paper, of course.