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The History of Letterhead

Before letterhead... before letter paper... even before paper…what did people use for written communications? Animal skins were also used extensively for documents. Despite its fragility, some of the most important manuscripts which survive from ancient times are written on leather. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the best example. Surviving manuscripts written on leather in Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Greek, Coptic, Nubian, and Pahlavi are also known... Their preservation was mainly due to the dry environments in which most of these manuscripts were found, such as in Egypt and the Dead Sea caves in Israel.

Parchment, made from sheep's skin, was used to make scrolls; however, parchment lent itself best to the codex form of book. The Romans used parchment tablets and possibly small "notebooks" for writing drafts and notes. To protect fragile papyrus scrolls while being handled, the Romans made covers out of parchment.

Palm leaves were among the first writing materials to be used, and some sources say that Sanskrit was first written on this material more than 6,000 years ago.

Babylonians, one of the first civilizations, used cuneiforms in writing in soft clay, which they then baked. Most of these tablets are early invoices or bills of sale. One of the earliest instances of personalization is found in a temple record of offerings at Jokha. The seal of the tablet contains the name of the scribe and his father, and the standing figure of a priest. The tablet is dated about 2300 B.C.

The Egyptians chiseled hieroglyphs in stone and also used papyrus, an aquatic plant that grew in the fertile Nile Valley. The Egyptian papyrus industry flourished from the 5th to 3rd Century B.C.

Paper was invented in China some 3,000 years after the ancient Egyptians used papyrus for writing. Cai Lun, a government official from the eastern Han dynasty, made paper by mixing the bark of a mulberry tree and bamboo fibers with water, draining and drying the mixture on a flat bamboo frame.

It wasn't until the 8th century that Arabs learned how to manufacture paper. This knowledge spread in Spain, Italy and France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, but in the middle ages in Europe paper was not made with tree bark. Rags or threads of hemp were used instead. Paper supplanted parchment in everyday use, commerce and legal documents in the middle ages.

"Letter paper" was the original term for what is currently known as Letterhead. The term "letterhead" first appeared as a commercial substitution for “letter paper” in American in 1890.

For much of the 19th century, there were two main styles for letterhead. The first had a horizontal layout and moveable type. The second utilized hand drawings with copper engraving and lithography.

In the first decades of the 20th century, letterhead got small in size and weight to accommodate typewriters. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, commercials logos began to dominate letterhead designs.