I love office supplies. Well maybe I should correct that – I love paper and pens and I love going to office supply stores to buy them. It’s that same feeling you had on the first day of school with your new binder and zippered pencil holder with brand new erasers and No. 2 pencils.
I get rather attached to certain pens and get cranky when I misplace them. I love my Pilot V pen right now – it’s a disposible fountain pen with dark blue ink. That’s the other thing – I don’t like black or red ink – I prefer dark blue but will occasionally delve into other colors like purple or green. But mostly dark blue. And I’m a sucker for those gel pens that are creamy colored.
My all time favorite place to shop for pens and paper is a shop called MaiDo in Palo Alto. It’s loaded with Japanese goodness like sushi shaped erasers, beautiful papers, pens, pencils, cases, notebooks, stickers – seriously it’s amazing. I only wish they had a website I could share with you – instead you just have to come here (or Santa Clara’s Santana Row or San Francisco’s SF Center). It’s worth the trip.
Why is it that foreign office supplies always seem so much nicer or more interesting than your own local offerings? The uniqueness? I had the good fortune to spend a year in Turkey when I was growing up and I remember, with great fondness, the little office supply stores in Ankara. Whole tables piled with interesting pens, pencils boxes and erasers that smelled like food (and you had to surreptitiously lick one or give it a little bite to see if it tasted as good as it smelled. They never did). When I’m not looking at locally made linens on travels I’m poking around in the office supply stores.
I stock up on notebooks at MaiDo. I like to have several going at once ~ one for my personal musings and notes and other for work related projects. I used to buy composition notebooks (you know, the ones with a mottled black and white cover) but then found the above Japanese ones. They have such an old fashioned appeal to me. I’m not a good journal writer (not consistent or interesting enough) but it is fun to hang on to my old notebooks and see what was going on in my life at a certain time. Mostly they contain jottings like phone numbers or to do lists but you can still get a little snapshot of what was going on at that time.
Now who couldn’t use an eraser set like this: