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| from the Wonderfair Website |
When you visit my home town, Lawrence, Kansas (that
is on your bucket list, right?), be sure to check out my favorite store there, and one of my favorite stores in the world:
Wonderfair, rightly titled Print Palace of the Great Plains. There you will find everything to write on, everything to write with, and a curated selection of other unparalleled paper-adjacent delights. If this doesn't quicken your heart, this blog post is not for you.
If it does, you may need the current Dewey Decimal selection, Stationery Fever, by John Z. Komurki. This book is a joy to behold and a fount of information about the origins, uses and unimagined possibilities of everyday objects like pencils, erasers and staplers. Read this book, appreciate its beautiful design, drool over the pictures of hitherto unimagined variations on the theme of "school notebook"-- but beware, because the love of office supplies can be a dangerous -and expensive-- condition. Here are just a few stunning pieces of design that are waiting to beautify your desk or backpack:
Beautiful paperclips, designed by Daphna Laurens. I mean, okay, they're paper clips, but aren't they elegant? CW Pencil Enterprise carries several other charming types of paper clips and pushpins as well.
The classic Stabilo Boss highlighter, available in 23 colors, is suitable not only for study but also for coloring and sketching, as illustrated above. It is noteworthy as one of the few watercolor pens on the market with a thick, arthritis-friendly barrel.
The Leuchtturm notebook is available in readymade versions, but why not specify your own size, ruling and cover color? No matter what you choose, you will also get the most blindingly obvious and brilliant innovation in notebooks known to man:
numbered pages and a table of contents. Journal writers, sketchbook keepers, and recipe collectors, you know what this means! For the first time in your life, you will actually be able to find that one thing you put in that one notebook sometime last winter-- provided you kept the table of contents updated!
Are you in UI/UX? I wish I was, because is not the above just a beautiful object? It is designed specifically for phone app developers.
You guys, these notebooks! They just have to be seen to be fully appreciated. I had to order them from
Present and Correct in the UK, but they are totally worth it. They are works of art that you can collaborate with as you keep your journal. They just have to be seen to be believed! Go online and look at the photos, but then just bite the bullet (if you live in the US) and pay the terrible exchange rate and the exorbitant postage, as they are the most elegant and inspiring journals you will ever own. Each volume is lined in the way indicated on the cover: ruled, grid, slanted and circular--
but every spread is a different pattern!!! Imagine the possibilities as you unspool your circular thinking or create a newspaper about your day with a page containing beautifully designed lined and unlined sections.
See what I mean? The more you know about paper, pencils, and staplers, the more you realize that these items you use every day can really be inspiring!
