This ad appears in the back of Real Sailor Songs, which M&Q recently acquired. This one small ad is crammed with great lines:

• “With Bad Paper, one’s Best is impossible”
• “Being of unusual, but not painful smoothness”
• “the pen slips with delicious freedom”
• “stay-at-homes who dislike the restraint of desk or table”

Sadly, I am unable to determine why hairlessness was such a selling point for stationery in the early twentieth century. I can only assume that lesser papers were more hirsute and therefore more taxing to write on.

Click on the image to see a larger version.–David E