As if any further proof were needed that the World Wide Web has a home for every obsession, I offer you Letterheady, an online compendium of celebrity stationery. It’s a project of Shaun Usher, a curator of “online homages to offline correspondence” who is also the collector behind the web sites and books Lists of Note and Letters of Note both of which are exactly as described on the box.
I am utterly enrapt by this collection. (And for space reasons, I kind of wish I’d hit upon this idea before I became a record collector.) Even the very plain examples—John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Rita Hayworth, Kate Bush—are compelling to me in their way, for reasons I am powerless to articulate, but some of the graphically designed pieces are just fantastic. (Also, I love that two of the most crucial graphic artists of the 20th Century had such sparse letterhead—I want to show those to every editor from my years as a magazine designer who ever handwaved my insistence that pages needed white space.) It was difficult to narrow them down to what I could show you here, so I have to recommend that you consider spending some time at the site itself.
Adam Ant
Martin and Lewis
Terry Gilliam
Anais Nin
Henry Miller
Dick Gregory
Bob Kane, Batman creator
Marcel Marceau
Factory Records
Leadbelly
Harpo Marx
Stacia Blake, artist, one-time dancer for Hawkwind
Hunter S. Thompson
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Bill Watterson
Gene Roddenberry
Marilyn Monroe
Jim Henson/Muppets Inc.
Georgia O’Keefe
Richard Simmons
Yet another hat tip to Beth Piwkowski for yet another great find.