A small paper shop, online.

Mercer Twain kept a small paper shop on a side street in Massachusetts in the 1920s. The story we tell ourselves is that he sold stationery, fountain pens, blotting paper, and the kind of envelopes that felt important when you held them. He had a particular eye for cream cardstock and a soft spot for the people who came in to write difficult letters — to a son who’d left home, to a daughter who’d married, to a friend who was sick.

Whether Mercer Twain ever existed is beside the point. The shop did, in some form, in every small town. We named ourselves after him because the work he did — making it slightly easier, slightly more beautiful, to put real words on real paper and send them through the mail to someone who would keep them — is the same work we’re doing now.