I couldn’t help but notice the pencil on the cover of the latest Beano issue. Well, I say the latest issue, when actually it was four issues ago because my son’s subscription is slow to arrive here on the continent. At least you can still subscribe to The Beano here. The Phoenix stopped their subscription to EU countries altogether because of issues with delayed and missing deliveries and they don’t offer a digital subscription either.
In case you’re wondering what the pencil prank is, have a look here:
On a different note: registration for the Pelikan Hub 2024 is open. You can register here: https://www.pelikan-hubs.com/
I hope to be able to run a Pelikan Hub again. As I am more familiar with my ‘new’ city, I have a better idea for the location this year.
Most of us only know the really expensive fountain pens [1]Not sure where to draw the line here. Maybe at €200 plus? from the Internet. No wonder – unless you live in a very big city or close to a specialist stationery store you probably don’t have much chance of seeing them in real life. It’s understandable that many shops don’t stock really expensive pens: they might not sell, so would end up just tying up money that could be used to buy other goods that sell faster.
I am wondering if shops with enough turnover can sell expensive pens on commission / don’t have to pay for them until they sell them. If you know how this works, please leave a comment. The fact that you don’t see expensive pens often makes me think that this is not the case.
With this in mind it came as a surprise to see not one, but three €2,000 fountain pens at a supermarket in Bremen. OK, I admit, that it is not a normal supermarket, but a rather unusual one: It is not part of any of the common German supermarket chains and there is only branch, i.e. it is not its own chain. It’s called Lestra and is a normal, but posh, supermarket that sells milk, bread, butter, cheese, meat – and has a small but very special stationery aisle.
In the top row of the shelf in the next photo you can see Pelikan’s Silver Screen fountain pen (€1,950) from 2009 (limited edition of 420 pens), Pelikan’s Herzstück fountain pen (€2,500) from 2019 (limited edition of 462 pens) and Pelikan’s Temple of Artemis fountain pen (€2,750) that is part of the Seven Wonders Of The World Series and was released in 2006 (limited edition of 440 pens).
As you can imagine this was a very unexpected discovery. Next time I visit I’ll look what other unusual items are there to be discovered.
I used to order my Techos from the Hobonichi store in Japan, but now that I live in Germany and only need the notebook itself, it turned out much cheaper to order it from PenStore.nl. Of course you don’t get the gimmicks that come with the Techo: a 3-colour uni Jetstream pen and this year also a little bag, but postage from Japan would have been about as much as the Techo itself.
It’s nice to be able to easily order from continental Europe again. Since Brexit I missed out on a few nice stationery items that were either too expensive to get into the UK or were not available in the UK.
I wonder what other stores I’ll discover that I missed out on so far. Unfortunately it’s now more expensive to order from nice UK shops like The Pen Company, Pen Heaven, Write Here and CultPens. Some of them pay duties and taxes for you, for others you have to pay via the delivery company, so you don’t know in advance how much it will cost…
How to use a lead pointer tub might not be that obvious. That must certainly a factor contributing to the video’s popularity, but it still doesn’t explain why the video remains popular to this day.
Many of the comments show that buyers of the lead pointer often don’t know how to use it properly and that they wish they had known about the video earlier.
Three years ago, one of the comments (see above) posted under the video said that Staedtler should point to this video. Well, a few days ago a follow up comment was posted (see below). It came from Bleistift viewer Björn who found the video because Staedtler is now printing a QR point on the lead pointer box, pointing to the Bleistift video explaining how to use the lead pointer!
What a surprise that was!! Björn also sent some photos of the new box with the QR code.
Thank you Björn for letting me know and thank you Staedtler for linking to the video.
