Your dogged correspondent trekked down to the London Stationery Show for a second year, and as previously there was an embarrassment of riches. Many of this year’s ‘finds’ are ones we’ll come back to, so here’s a quick report to whet your appetite.
Highlights included:
- The Manuscript stand, with hands-on calligraphy area and of course the rather splendid new ML1856 – which we’re hoping to review before too long.
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Kaweco – having now seen the brass version of the Special it’s obvious why it immediately sold out, but we’ll be back to review it when we can get our hands on a few.
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Meeting Stuart, who now runs the excellent Pocket Notebooks site – a great guy to talk to, and we’ll be reviewing his wares very soon.
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Encountering the revamped Silvine red notebooks; pictures don’t really do them justice.
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Playing with the very nice brass pens and pencils from Ystudio. We’ll get some to review if we can.
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Flipping through the new Rhodia Heritage Collection; they really do look the business and we are endeavouring to acquire some to test.
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Discovering that Fabriano notebooks are coming back to our high streets soon; good-quality dot grids which you don’t have to go online for sound like they could be very handy.
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Meeting the owner of the new bricks-and-mortar shop in lovely Hexham, Penfax.
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Admiring the refillable notebooks for people who know that ‘traveller’ has two Ls, from Paper Republic – and yes, we’re aiming to review those too.
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Discovering that Sheaffer still make some proper posh pens. We can’t be so certain of getting some of those to play with, but we’ll see.
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Wading through a veritable forest of shiny new Leuchtturm notebooks, with a lot of understandable fuss about how 1917 was, y’know, a whole century ago and everything, and watching their portable embossing machine and old-school Gutenberg lettering rack in progress (see below for more on how to bag the results).
Lowlights included:
- Heating which threatened to boil all exhibitors alive, until a merciful cool-down after lunch.
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A certain rather well-known manufacturer whose representatives didn’t recognise one of their own pens, got confused about how flex nibs worked and had to be given a brief lecture on model numbers and the difference between push-button converters and piston filling systems. We shall leave them unidentified to spare their blushes… don’t mess with penthusiasts, people!
Win the notebook
Leuchtturm kindly embossed our name in a silver on a unique United Inkdom A6 notebook, and with only one of them in the whole world we couldn’t possibly divide it between our team so we decide to hand it over to you! We asked for comments with weird and wonderful ideas about what you’d do with such notebook in your pocket (or indeed in your hand), and the winning answer was, well, world domination. How could we argue?
A little bit of history Glaciers, weathering and tectonic plates were all involved to a greater or lesser extent in separating the Lothian volcanoes from the kingdom of Fife, but ever since the Forth Bridge became the world’s largest project management metaphor, both sides of the firth have been part of an on-and-off industrial heartland. That engineering heritage was recently sparked in to life in one local business unit by the Kickstarter project which brought Namisu into being, and they’re now producing a couple of models in an increasingly diverse range of materials. Some of us have been interested since those heady Kickstarter days, but the word is spreading fast…
Where to get hold of one Right now, buying from
