Lunalux, the hip printing shop and paper-goods boutique on Minneapolis' Harmon Place near Loring Park, plays tricks on your sense of chronology. There's a gentle, archaic aroma of printer's ink in the air, and two massive old presses stand ready to chug and churn as they turn out letterpress. Shelves of colored inks line one wall. All around, on counters, tables, and racks, are finely crafted objects of printed paper for sale: stationery, greeting cards, notebooks—the things upon which we celebrated and recorded the high points of our lives back before telephones sprouted keyboards and messages turned instant.
    
But if you take a closer look at the paper goods on sale, you realize that this shop does tradition with many a stylish postmodern twist. A gaudy notebook, titled "Dumpling Dynasty," is adorned with an image inspired by the perverse perkiness of Chinese propaganda posters: a red-cheeked little boy on a scooter, delivering a bag of "Laughing Mouth Flour." A greeting card by the Vancouver design/printery Regional Assembly of Text sports a mock-heraldic juxtaposition of two bears and a goose around a shield, and pinned to the shield is a detachable button that allows the recipient to proclaim her- or himself "A Perfectly Charming Individual."
    
And then there are the charmingly surreal cards that Lunalux itself makes and sells; one depicts a toddler with chicken claws instead of feet, leaning forward to try and catch a flying insect. The text: "Never stop chasing your dreams."
    
There are Lamy pens for sale too, and elegant reprints of antique French school notebooks, and candy: old-school candy like Teaberry gum, Stallion candy cigarettes, and even Sen-Sen, the breath freshener that debuted in the 1890s. You get the feeling that all the sweets were chosen for the graphic beauty of their packaging.
    
Continuing a Tradition

In their various ways, all these things express the sensibility of Jenni Undis, the shop's second owner. Letterpress printer Tim Gartman and his girlfriend, Jeaneen Gauthier, founded the shop in 1993, and in 1996 Undis, an art major fresh out of Macalester College, came aboard as an intern. Gauthier eventually split up with Gartman and left the business, and after Gartman died of Hodgkin's disease in 2003, Undis found herself at a crossroads. "I felt that if I didn't buy this business somehow, I wouldn't have any idea what to do for a job," she says.
    
With generous financing from Gartman's family, Undis became the owner. Running Lunalux was a return to roots for Undis, who grew up in the printing trade (her parents founded Custom Craftsman Printing in Golden Valley) but who wanted a chance to take what she calls "a more artistic approach to the craft."

She continued the tradition Gartman established of infusing letterpress traditionalism with a genial hipness, ramping up the shop's retail offerings—which languished for a time—as she expanded its wholesale product line. Lunalux was one of the first design shops in the country to create original letterpress greeting cards as an artisanal, "indie" alternative to Hallmark et al., and Undis continues to craft them, as well as postcards, stationery sets, and unique items like the Fortune Folio—a repository for "keeper" fortune-cookie fortunes—and the Call Me Card, a sort of fill-in-the-blanks business card adorned with either the Minneapolis or the Saint Paul area code.
    
Lunalux products sell in upwards of 100 shops all over the country. "Our sales reps have done a particularly good job in California, the Pacific Northwest, and Chicago," says Undis, "and we're in New York, Texas, Washington, DC, Florida, and a number of other places."
    
And then there's the custom job printing Lunalux does: wedding invitations, personal stationery, business cards, posters, and the like. Despite the penchant for the offbeat and edgy that the Lunalux retail side displays, Undis is a solid defender of the traditional virtues of fine printing too. "I love it when my clients want the qualities that letterpress does best," she says. "Strong type, clear, clean images, and fine paper"—as opposed to the requests she sometimes gets for photo reproduction, big blocks of solid color, or other things that the more modern offset process does better.

Creative Strategies

Undis designs everything from scratch in consultation with clients, and, of course, she loves it when a client gives her carte blanche to work in her own way. "I like working with clients who appreciate the creative process," she says, and this may explain why her clients have included Prince's Paisley Park recording studio, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and trendy, design-conscious Twin Cities restaurateur Thom Pham—Undis created the announcements for the grand opening of his latest Asian-fusion venture, Thom Pham's Wondrous Azian Kitchen in downtown Minneapolis.

Being both a wholesaler and a retailer gives Undis some unique advantages, she says. "Seeing what people buy gives me a lot more input into the kind of things I want to manufacture than I would have if I were just creating in a vacuum," she says. She attends trade shows as manufacturer/wholesaler, while keeping a sharp eye out for items she might want to sell back home.

Trips to New York whetted her appetite for Asian paper goods, which she explored at the Kinokuniya Japanese bookstore in Rockefeller Center (now closed) and at Pearl River Mart, a gigantic shopping center with two locations in Chinatown. The sturdy, elegantly designed Apica line of Japanese notebooks is a particular favorite—"a great marriage of design and excellent manufacturing," says Undis.

And although Lunalux was one of the first shops in the United States to carry the popular--and even sturdier--Moleskine line of notebooks, with their aura of literary glamour, the only Moleskines Undis sells now are datebooks. "By now," she says, "you can find Moleskines at the mall.

"I don't want to have a store full of stuff you can buy anywhere."

Jon Spayde is Managing Editor of The Line


Photos, top to bottom:

Jenni Undis, Lunalux's owner

A wall of cards by many makers, including Lunalux itself

The shop's venerable presses

Undis setting type. While some jobs require hand-set type, most are printed with plates made from computer designs.

All photos by Bill Kelley