Pens and inks have been covered, so this completes the triumvirate.
I didn't set up a poll, because paper comes in a different forms -
boxed and packaged sets, tablets, reams. Just curious to know if
there any other stationery nuts out there.

edit: syntax.

more than I will ever use

I'm close to that. But I go through my HP 32lb and my Royal Silk pretty quickly.

I have enough to give me a variety of sizes and types.

I just checked, and I have more than I thought. I have a lot more stationery than pens.

2 boxes folded bordered notes/envelopes
3 boxes bordered correspondence cards/envelopes
2 boxes bordered letter stationery/envelopes
1 large box of letter stationery engraved with address/envelopes (share w/ spouse)

It's all from Crane, acquired mostly as gifts. The ones I bought were half-price on clearance.

I'm really lacking in the notepad/memopad area, and I'm toying with the idea of fashioning my own using that HP 32# laserjet paper I read about here.

I have tons and tons of paper plus a box of 500 envelopes that I draw on whenever I have the chance (for future letters.) I only have one box of "official" matching stationery: ivory correspondence cards embossed with my name on them and matching envelopes.

More stationery sounds like a good idea.

Blueiris, not to be a giant enabler, but Richard Binder has some really nifty-looking notepads on his site, and of course I'm sure they work wonderfully with FPs. They are on my (getting very long) 'buy' list.

I have two boxes of Crane notecards, and other than that I generally use Clairefontaine unlined A4 or various FP-friendly office papers. I scrounged a bunch of nice paper (about 250 sheets each of Classic Crest Writing and Swarthmore Writing) at work when we moved offices--the design group didn't want to transport half reams, so yay for me. I did spring for a ream of HP 32# Laser, maybe $8.50.

You giant enabler, you! Actually, my friend just got those notepads from Richard Binder and reports that they are excellent. They're among the ones I'm considering.

I haven't gone shopping for the HP 32# laser stuff yet, but $8.50 sounds like a great price. I've seen it online for almost twice the price (on Staples.com). Where did you buy yours?

Just at Office Depot. If you PM me your address, I'll send you a few sheets as a sample. I like it but I don't adore it, so you might as well be sure it's right for you.

The previous batch of FPN notepads/full size sheets is really wonderful stuff...and it is being offered again...
(I'm not trying to feed anyone's stationery addictions, really! <_< )

I have a small stack of various notebooks (fewer than ten), and one pad of plain white letter paper. I don't know what I will do with all these pens and all this ink.

Given that almost all my friends prefer email or the telephone, it's probably futile to hope that I will ever use up my stockpile. It fills half the drawers under the window seat in my office, and is probably too much to detail here, since it would make the biblical begats look short and concise.

The sad thing is that I would trade all of it for a set of Crane's personalized engraved correspondence cards, letter sheets, and matching envelopes in that nifty wooden stationary box of theirs. Even I, spendthrift that I am, have trouble blowing almost cool grand on something I will probably never use.

Has anyone else succumbed to Crane's engravers?

Have you ever tried snailing with other pen enthusiasts? It's so much fun!

Does Crane's personalized engraved stationery literally cost almost $1000? :doh:

Article from The Atlantic on Crane's Paper that you might be interested in (reposted from Styleforum.com)
Warning: LONG


There is no substitute for engraved writing paper

by Corby Kummer | May 01 '01

A few months ago I was browsing through a linen-covered wooden folio of engraved paper in the Rome branch of Pineider, Italy's most elegant stationer. I was revisiting a youthful fascination with lettering and paper—one that extended from my childhood, when I exploited my older brother's interest in letterpress printing to obtain my first personalized stationery, through early trips abroad, when I visited engravers and wished I could afford to place an order. Twenty years ago, when the dollar was strong against the lire, I spent whole afternoons poring over the choices at Pineider's flagship store, in Florence, finally settling on a typeface and paper. The design I chose—simple but peculiarly Italian block capitals, printed in gray ink on gray-bordered paper and heavy cards—became as fixed a part of my identity as gray flannels during the week, khakis on weekends, and stopping at every pastry shop.

My taste in typefaces may have shifted slightly over two decades, but not my belief in the primacy of the letter—the noblest and certainly the pleasantest form of communication. A handwritten note remains the only real acknowledgment of a gift or a kindness, and I disapprove of another person's delay in sending one nearly as strongly as I do of my own. I never discard handwritten cards and letters, luxuriating in their look and feel on receipt and again during infrequent and usually unsuccessful attempts to store them in an orderly way. And nothing is as handsome, or as serious in intent, as engraved paper.

Recently my sister and brother-in-law found the house they'd been looking for, the one in which they plan to see their young children into hood. To mark the occasion my family gave them engraved house stationery, with the address as letterhead. We ordered it from Crane, the U.S. equivalent of Pineider in history and reputation. As I looked through Crane's books of stationery, I thought again about matching typeface and paper to a sense of self. Learning that Crane produces its paper and personalized stationery in my state, Massachusetts, prompted me to visit the company to see firsthand a process that had helped define me. And knowing I would be in Italy made me decide to compare what I saw at Crane with the way things are done nowadays at Pineider.

Things had changed in Italy: not the beauty of the displays or the correctness of the tailored salespeople but the vast choice of typefaces I remembered being both bewildered and enchanted by. Now there were just seven, a salesman told me, as he opened a large binder of cardboard pages—the most popular and classic styles. I glanced at the shaded and cursive and unornamented faces, both comforted and vaguely disappointed that they included a version of my plain block capitals. Wasn't anything else available? I asked.

Eventually the folio containing stationery ordered over several decades appeared, accompanied by the man who had served most of the customers whose paper it contained. Carlo Bertolaccini has sold Pineider stationery in Rome for forty-four years. He looks something like John Gielgud and speaks with a reserve that seems to cloak wit and a deep understanding of human desires. The factory in Florence might or might not be able to reproduce any style that caught my eye, Bertolaccini told me; young people willing to apprentice themselves to a skilled engraver are rare, and the lifetime artisans are retiring or gone. The seven styles in the new book are typeset by computer, and the dies are created by acid bath rather than incised by hand start to finish—as every die was until five or so years ago. Hand-etched " classico " dies are still offered as a higher-priced alternative to typeset dies. But he couldn't guarantee that any of the remaining artisans would be willing or able to etch a typeface long out of use.

As I turned over sheet after sheet, Bertolaccini pointed out letterheads and colors he found particularly successful, occasionally seizing one as if it were an old friend and holding it up to the light. Then I saw a very familiar gray-bordered sheet, and my own name.

Unlike Pineider, Crane uses only computers to create the lettering for its dies, having decided decades ago to digitize the typefaces it offers and to keep a wide range in active use. Despite the abandonment of hand-incised typefaces, a remarkable amount of the work that goes into Crane's stationery is still done by hand, I discovered when I drove last winter to its factory in North Adams, a scrappy former mill town in the northwest corner of Massachusetts. Long economically depressed, though proud of its history and its commanding position high in the Berkshires, North Adams has recently seen a revival with the opening of Mass MOCA, a contemporary-arts center in a renovated textile-factory complex.

The plant where Crane, a family firm marking its 200th anniversary this year, produces its engraved stationery is a few miles down the road from Mass MOCA, in a bland modern building the company has occupied since 1988. "We thought we'd be playing soccer in here," Ed Czarnecki, the director of product development, told me as he gestured toward a large factory floor covered with a haphazard assortment of presses and work tables. "Instead we've grown by leaps and bounds." The continued activity on the printing floor as afternoon turned to evening testified to the solid three to five percent annual rise in engraved-stationery sales in the 1990s—years when e-mail was theoretically replacing posted letters, and when PCs and laser printers put graphic design and stationery production within reach of anyone. The desire for something palpable, handsome, and handmade (or at least partially handmade) apparently endures.

The second floor has been fortified to bear the weight of the die archive, which is housed in an appealing jumble of wooden-drawered file cabinets and steel shelves. The small, heavy dies are wrapped in white paper and string; some are filed by name, others by number. The many-ton library represents only ten years' worth of names. Every year, Czarnecki told me, the factory ships off dies that have remained dormant for ten years. I had imagined that a die would be kept forever. Melting one down seems akin to trying to recycle someone's soul.

The first aisle we walked through was devoted, surprisingly, to Tiffany: Crane has produced all of the store's stationery since 1977, and also makes most of Cartier's personalized stationery and Christmas cards. It produces a separate line of watermarked paper and boxes and a specially designed typeface for each company. (Later, above a work station, I saw a large robin's-egg-blue Tiffany box marked BIG RUBBER BANDS.) Almost no one else produces engraved stationery in the United States: Dempsey & Carroll, a Baltimore company with stores in Washington and New York, may be the only other company with a national presence.

"When it comes to the social-stationery game, there are not many players," Czarnecki said. "It's a tough business. There's a high volume of small orders, all of them custom. You can't just lock up the press and run it. Every day we get hundreds of calls asking to step up an order or pull it in the middle of production to make a change. We go through every order sheet by sheet, doing cleaning and eraser work. We tie the ribbons on each birth announcement and count and band every box." Czarnecki, a carefully dressed man, joined the company forty-four years ago.

The workers' involvement in what they do seemed unstaged. "It's a little boy—a real little one," a woman said as she showed me the artwork for the birth announcement of a baby weighing three pounds, ten ounces. The artwork was in the form of a photographic negative, as for offset printing, which would be chemically etched onto a copper plate. Creating letters by machine rather than by hand means the loss of the unevenness and individual eccentricity that until recently made every Pineider die, for example, unique. But it does allow great freedom in the choice of what can be engraved. The staff artists, I was assured, could reproduce by hand any historical type style that took my fancy—but the style would probably be in the Crane archives anyway. Nor have etching tools disappeared. In the die-making room I saw workers examine for flaws copper plates just out of an acid bath and regouge by hand parts of characters that hadn't been incised deeply enough.

The actual printing is still remarkably personalized. I watched Joseph Mulder—a bearded, friendly man with suspenders over a T-shirt—fill a pan at the back of a press (the "fountain") with viscous ink the color of duct tape as he got ready to print an order of house stationery. This was the second time Mulder would feed each full-size sheet through the press. He had already printed an address at the bottom, and this pass was for the name of the house, in the upper right.

Crane's and other American presses are designed for water-based inks, which are matte, and European presses for oil-based inks, which are glossy. The difference in appearance can be dramatic, as I saw on a visit to the small, modern factory where Pineider prints its stationery, in a gorgeous part of Tuscany near Florence and bordering Chianti. If the Crane printing floor was the size of a soccer field, the Pineider floor was barely the size of two squash courts. Along one wall I saw slatted wooden racks, like the ones at an old-fashioned bakery, covered with sheets hand-arranged to expose only the familiar logo of a U.S.-based car company at the top left corner. The logos looked like shiny blue pools. I also saw the opulent gold and silver miter and keys of the papal seal.

Rote as the hand-feeding might seem, the printer's work in setting up an order is almost as detailed as the inspectors' after it is finished. The printer must prepare a "counterboard," which ensures that under tons of pressure the die won't cut straight through the paper. The counterboard looks like a piece of white foamcore with cutouts to receive lines of text on the metal plate. How closely the printer hews to the outline of the text in cutting the counterboard determines how much flattened, shiny paper will surround each line on the engraved sheet or card—a telltale sign of true engraving, along with the indentation on the back. The sort of people who flip china over to find the maker always run a finger over the back of a letterhead.

Finger runners are making sure that the process was not thermography, usually thought of as cut-rate engraving. Thermography is straightforward offset printing, in which a piece of black plastic is put directly onto an automated press instead of onto a piece of metal to etch a die. The difference between thermography and "flat" printing, the kind used in magazines and newspapers, is a final sprinkling of powdered glue over the wet ink, which mixes with it to create raised letters. (Excess glue is removed by vacuum, and the ink is dried under hot blowers.) Nice as thermography can look, it can never offer the depth and desirable unevenness of engraving, let alone the tactile pleasure.

The thickness of the counterboard and the force of the press determine the depth of the indentation in engraving, and the printer adjusts both according to his and the customer's preference. "Some people want heavy bruising," Mulder told me. The goal at Pineider is the opposite: workmen try to cut the counterboard to produce a clear image with a minimum of flattening around the letters, and adjust the pressure to cause the subtlest indentation. This may be because Pineider has never offered thermography. "Why bother with a halfway step?" Riccardo Capecchiacci, the director of Pineider production, asked when I visited. "It's so much less elegant."

Crane has long offered both thermography and engraving, and now the choices of typeface, ink color, and paper are also the same. The difference is price. Because thermographed sheets whiz through the press and engraved sheets are fed one by one, engraving costs an average of a third more. At Crane, Mulder told me while hand-feeding the sheets for the engraving job I had watched him set up, "almost no one asks for light bruising."

Look at this O, " Bertolaccini said at the Rome branch of Pineider, as he held my stationery up to the light. "It's much flatter than the regular bastoncino. " The block capitals I had long ago chosen, usually labeled gothic in this country, are called "little sticks" in Italian. He opened an old book of Pineider type styles, the kind made only by hand, and found a page of six or seven bastoncino styles, each subtly different. He showed me mine, with its shapely but not exaggerated horizontal compression. "This was my favorite," he said. "I directed all my clients toward it. It's clean, handsome, and linear. You can never tire of it." I felt immensely gratified.

I had already seen how my name looked in the current version of bastoncino when I visited the Pineider factory, where a woman who designs orders printed my name on her screen and compared it with the engraved card I had brought. Not only the shape of the letters but also the spacing was quite different. She tinkered with the image on the screen to make it more like the lettering on my card—adjustments similar to those she makes for each order, she told me. It was pleasing, but it wasn't the same. I was glad that, for now, the classico option of hand-incised dies is still available.

I showed Bertolaccini a style I had fallen for, a kind of Art Nouveau-Art Deco take on bastoncino that seemed utterly Italian. Ah, he said with gentle reservation—however captivating, novelty will wear off. Better to stay with a timeless face and with unobtrusive but elegant colors for paper and ink. And don't make the characters too big, he said when I showed him letterheads similar to mine but in a larger type size I found impressive. The discreet size the Pineider engraver had picked for my name was the right one, he assured me. But he would move the letterhead down a half centimeter the next time I ordered.

All this remains good advice for buying stationery. I've found that correspondence cards—the size of postcards but nearly as heavy as pasteboard, with just a name or a monogram centered at the top or on the upper left—are by far the most versatile, fine for very short notes yet with room for a surprising amount of text on front and back. Monarch-size paper (7G x 10H inches) is best for personal stationery; business sheets look like they're for business. Fancy faces and fancy colors and other whimsical attempts at individuality may provoke the sort of gently reproving look Bertolaccini gave my new infatuation, not to mention your own eventual disenchantment. You can loosen your color restraints when picking an envelope lining. Unless you're as sure as my sister is of remaining at one address, you might stick to your name only, which will reduce the cost. Be sure you know where the die will be stored and for how long. Crane maintains an informative and helpful site at Crane.com, which will tell you where you can obtain a sample of your name in a certain typeface. (A hundred engraved Crane correspondence cards with name only and unprinted, unlined envelopes costs $160, which includes a one-time charge for the die. The same number of thermographed cards costs $127.) Pineider.com is for now unfortunately outdated, uninformative, and only in Italian, but the company promises a redesigned and bilingual site by the end of the year. At the Web site of the English firm Smythson (Smythson.com) you can download a catalogue of beautiful papers or order a gorgeously produced sample packet of its papers and engraving styles—all still hand-etched, a salesperson at the Bond Street headquarters told me, and the handsomest and most extensive range I found.

I invited Bertolaccini for a coffee, and he took me to a bar in the lobby of an Art Nouveau theater next door, where he immediately pointed out that the lettering on a period poster was similar to one of the typefaces I had liked. Even though the company had already changed hands several times since it went out of the Pineider family, in 1989, Bertolaccini told me he was confident about its future. Engraved stationery is still a rite of passage open to all. "Not everyone is born high," he said. "We're the massimo "—the summit—and even those of modest means can afford it.

I thought of my pleasure when I opened my first box of Pineider cards, each bundle of twenty-five wrapped by hand in tissue paper, and how much a part of me those gray letters now seem. I thought of my sister's joy at opening our gift to her family. "Now I know it's really our house," she said.

For that kind of money you could hire someone to write the letters for you...

I always love Corby Kummer's writing, he takes OCD to an art form.

Wonderful read, makes me want some hand-engraved stationery!

Thanks for the input, Sonia_Simone. I've PM'd you.

Ana,
Thank you very much for posting Corby Kummer's essay!
I found it so interesting, and it brought back fond memories
of several sessions at Crane's choosing the font, size, color
and paper for my engraved calling card and stationery. The choice
of font for one's name is a fascinating process. The relationship of the
letters in regards to size, spacing, and letter angle make big differences
even though fonts look quite alike in their sample books. Crane's stores
have a computer program that allows you to see how your name looks
with different fonts and sizes of fonts to help avoid mistakes. Make sure
you have a lot of time, because there are many font choices and sizes.
The order took about a month. I was also given the copper engraved plates,
so whenever I run out, I just return the plates and choose the paper/card.
Cheers,
J

I have a couple of Moleskines and several other brands of journal/note book that I am testing. I want to find a good Moleskine alternative, with better FP paper.

As for snail stationery I dont have enough, just a white pad and an ivory pad, it will do for now but I really should stock up on some more.

Dawn

Here's some good looking stuff (no affiliation):
http://www.thornwillow.com/customprinting/...eringstyles.php
Check out the menu options on the left hand margin.
I believe Thornwillow did the MeisterButten stationery for MontBlanc.
Enjoy!
J

Thanks for posting the delightful article Ana. I guess I'll just have to live vicariously through the author since I've blown my monthly budget on two fountain pens, a vintage desk set, and a pen display box. Man. I really need to sell some stuff before while I can still walk through my office!

Here's where I came up with the $1000 for Crane's. It's for an entire Stationary wardrobe actually. (These prices are from Dec 2004, so they may be different now.)

1) Engraved name on letter sheets and engraved address on matching envelopes, 50 of each $283
Lining for envelopes $25 for 25, so add $50
Plain second sheets $9 per 25
Name Die $48
Address Die $48
Total: $438

2) Engraved name on Correspondence Cards with engraved address on matching envelopes, 50 of each for $298
Lining for envelopes $50
Use Dies from above
Total: $348

3) Engraved Monogram on folded notes with engraved address on matching envelopes, 50 of each for $276
Lining for envelopes $50
Monogram Die $48
Total: $374

That's a whopping $1160, plus I'd of course want the Crane's cherry finish box to hold them all, that's another $119. So, better make it $1279, plus tax.

I guess you can see why I haven't run out and ordered it yet.

I may also give one of these a shot (no affiliation)

http://www.thestationerystudio.com/stationery.cfm

http://www.americanstationery.com/

If anyone's used them, please let me know how it went!

Thanks,
Kate

I have ordered from American Stationery with fine results. I recently got embossed correspondence cards from Always Stationery - http://alwaysstationery.com/ - they had even better prices than American Stationery and I prefered their paper for fountain or dip pens. Both places will send you samples if you want to test the paper first.

Very Cool! I appreciate the tip.

Kate,

You don't have to get the entire personal wardrobe at once.
You might want to start with a plate engraved with your name or monogram that
would fit a variety of stationery pieces. That way you can order for example,
standard letter stationery first. Later use the plate to order a set of folded
notes. Later use the plate to order correspondence cards. And so on.
Enjoy!

You're welcome! I thought that article was so interesting, and possibly just a tiny bit pretentious as well.

I would LOVE to have some of that fabulous stationery; I've been poking my head into every stationery and Crane's store that I come across. But it is SOOOOO expensive, and since I'm blowing so much money on pens and ink and Clairefontaine and book binding classes, I figure I'll stick with my Mohawk Eggshell Superfine that I get from work for now. Media services cuts it in half for me for free, and the "invitation" style ecru envelopes from Office Depot ($9 for 100) match perfectly.

But that still doesn't stop me from going into every stationery store I see! <sigh>

What, there's something wrong with pretentious?


I have so much stationary, I really can't justify buying anymore. That doesn't keep me from wanting it however. There's just something so cool about having your monogram plastered on there, and your return address in matching ink on the back of the envelope. Does this mean I have identity issues?

In the case of stationery (pardon the pun) amount counts....

Kate, you just need to start snailing with some FPNers, we can burn through your stationery at wonderful rates!

I can't argue with anyone cool enough to quote the tick!

I reconerted to Moleskines as a way to organize my day-to-day and meeting work notes. I found after looking at moleskine hack there is are many great ways to organize your notebook --which was the problem in the past. I use have

moleskine large--- used as a protype to try out new organization methods
moleskine large--- used for my planner and meeting notes
moleskine pocket-- used for personal everyday... trips sights etc.
moleskine reoprter -pocket-- to track calls/requests from people at work--

I have 2 large pads of clairfontaine stapled (black
2 Rhodias wire bound 6x8
2 Rhodia stapled black (large size)

500 levenger, note cards

That's really how I focus my stationery after trying out and spending $$ on levenger circa.

I suspect I spend about 150.00 a year on Stationery....

I have lots. And lots. And lots. And lots. It's practically uncountable.