Love Stationery with Me

Smooth pens, crispy post-its, and other paper parties

Love stationery with me.

Don’t leave me alone with these beautiful little tools that turn my table into the National Institute of Design.

Don’t underestimate the power of a smooth pen to help you get unstuck, the forgiveness of a Non-Dust eraser, the way post-its can align like planets to rearrange your disconnected life.

The smooth Pentel Energel and classic yellow post-it notes

Your apps, your keyboards, your screens will not mind if you take a glamorous notebook to bed one night. Sometimes, paper grounds us like the tree it is made from. Pens let us dig for a deeper reality.

You care so much about researching headphones, their ‘fit’, their bass before you buy them. You hunt down the cool sneakers made precisely for your foot type. Why do you find the same level of attention to stationery so trivial? Why do you use the same old register and student gel pen when you’ve grown so much over the years?

I see you get attracted to turquoise notebooks and creamy-dotted journals. Sometimes you buy one but don’t feel like ‘ruining’ it with your silly thoughts. You tuck it with your unused art supplies. You feel so guilty about having spent on stationery you didn’t use that you haven’t bought a new pen in ages. You look at origami sheets and miss your childhood. You think ‘Who has the time?’ and keep them back on the shelf.

Can you allow yourself the luxury of a new pencil?

You have the money now. Or you don’t. You may or may not be gainfully employed, but when you’re on a break, waiting for a job, or confused about what your next steps should be, stationery is an ally in your quest. A hundred lists need to be made. You might be broke like my grandmother was when she could not afford five pencils for her five kids. So she chopped one pencil into five with her betel nutcracker. Two generations later, owing to both privilege and effort, I have a big box of pens that sustained my family through the lockdown. I won’t push you to buy expensive stationery, but I also don’t want you to get stuck with a rough pen that fumbles and falters or a pencil with a brittle lead.

Don’t be stationary with stationery. Move with me. Let’s go on a date to the stationery shop. Isn’t it a happening place? Isn’t it sensual to touch tinted sheets and smell scented erasers? Listen to the roller pen tip as it skates on the wad of trial paper when you scribble, “Hello! Anybody here?” Look, the sharpener has a nose pin! The oil pastels are waiting to be undressed. The fountain pen, the queen of all stationery, is thirsty for your ink.

Fountain Pen, ₹80, Peacock Cap and the effort it takes to make it smoother

If the sexy stationery talk is not working on you, let’s move to a serious look into history. When I was looking at professor Erika Lindemann’s chronology and history of writing composition in the human civilisation, I was amazed to see it start from Socrates in the 4th century BCE and end at the creation of the internet in 1983. She mentions the people who changed the way words were written: Seneca, Shakespeare, Dickens, Chomsky. She also notes events that shaped written communication, like the ancient book on Greek grammar, first printing press, first daily newspaper, first Nobel Prize for literature and so on. Guess what else does professor Erika include? This:

First known graphite pencil — 1565
Envelopes first used — 1839
Eraser attached to pencil — 1858
Hand-held pencil sharpener — 1890
Paper clip patented — 1898
Slip-in metal pen points patented — 1828
Desk model office stapler — 1914
Cellophane tape invented — 1925
Ballpoint pens manufactured —1943
Post-it notes developed —1980

It was thrilling to notice that the history of stationery can’t be separated from the history of writing. The cycle of creation is beautiful: a handful of creators invent tools so that the rest of us can create. It could be Spencer Silver, who failed at making an adhesive for aeroplane construction but accidentally succeeded at making the delicate glue for post-it notes. Or it could be 9-year-old Kashmiri boy Muzaffar Ahmad Khan who invented a counting pen. Upset with low marks in a test, the third-grader made a pen that reflects the word count of an answer. 

Can you see how what we call stationery is aeons of human invention that can fit in a pencil box? (Or the whole of Japan)

Why do I want you to like stationery so much? Because I am tired of meeting in cafes. I am tired of speaking about the ‘big’ and the ‘latest’ I am desperate for us to show each other the little things that seduce our creativity. I want to collaborate - you, me, and a pen stand overflowing like a fountain of colour pencils.

Yes, lip balms belong to the pen stand. And yes, let’s give ourselves gold stars for tough tasks.

I too have forgotten about these little wonders many times. I have told myself, “You don’t deserve this notebook. Your thoughts are shit.” Most of my thoughts were shit indeed, which is precisely why I needed a notebook! To let them out, to slowly move from venting to dreaming. I can chart a whole phase of growth in my life through my visits to Mayur Stationers in Nagpur, Anupam Stationery Mall in Mumbai, Raj Stationers in Ahmedabad. Muji and Miniso don’t compare to Sharda Emporium, the first stationery shop of my life, where I got my pens refilled and re-nibbed a hundred times. I don’t always like my hometown, Nagpur, but I am proud that it has a ‘Pen Hospital’ in its oldest market.

Once I tasted the power of bullet journals and index cards, I felt more confident investing in them. Now, I know they give 10 times return on investment, and also that little joy, that first letter being inscribed in a blank notebook, that camel appearing in the vast desert - is worth everything. Love that first letter with me. And try loving stationery.

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Extra reading on stationery

1. Agha Shahid Ali: Stationery

2. Seamus Heaney: Digging

3. “If all the world were paper,

   kind deeds would be post-it notes

   that stick to the doer in ever-growing trails,

   so we would always remember,

   friends would come with perforated lines

   so you could keep their best bits with you

   at all times…

   ..If all the world were paper

   dreams would be braille

   so we could read them whilst we slept,

   nightmares would be shopping lists

   because shopping lists are so easy to forget.”

   If all the world were paper - Joseph Coelho

4. “But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price...the rewards of any purchase – the reason we buy it at all — stay locked up until both prices are paid.” - David, Everything Must be Paid for Twice on Raptitude

5. Oliver Sacks wrote everywhere! “On a plain piece of legal paper, he ponders the mysteries of consciousness. In a lengthy diary entry snaking around the cartoon airplanes on an airline menu, he records with childlike wonder the thrill of being allowed to go inside the cockpit and marvels at the “hundreds! thousands of dials” inside the “tiny cabin.” On the inside of a folder, he contemplates what it means to be alive. On hotel stationery, he contrasts fancy and imagination. On two loose leaves stapled, he distinguishes between the two modes of creativity.” - Maria Popova, Inside Oliver Sacks’s Creative Process on The Marginalian

6. The long story behind the 5 rupee wonder: Link Ocean Gel Pen