Seen in the wild

Quiet! It’s a book store

 in Seen in the wild  tagged Shanghai / Shanghai Hongkou Dragon Dream Shopping Centre / 上海 by
Sisyphe

Sisyphe’s entrance

‘Quiet’ said the employee to a customer. Wherever I look, I see books in the shelves. You’d think this is a library, especially because of what the employee just said, but funnily enough, the employee doesn’t mind talking to another customer ..talking even louder than the customer she just shushed.

We are in a bookstore in Shanghai’s Hongkou Dragon Dream Shopping Centre1.

Inside Sisyphe

Inside Sisyphe

I wonder whether this shushing is some sort of marketing gag – like when you see employees at makeup counters dressed in lab coats – to make you think they are kind of like scientists or pharmacists.

‘Quiet’ is so that people can read their books in the library, but as a store, they want to earn money, so you wouldn’t want to visitors to read the books in the bookstore, you want them to buy the books, at least that’s how I thought it works. The shushing might be intended to make you feel as if you are in a less mundane place. Shushing = library, library = the equivalent of a spiritual 1UP.

Monami Olika and fake Hero Safaris

Monami Olikas and fake Hero Safaris (bottom right)

Like in virtually all bookstores in Shanghai, there’s a nice selection of ‘lifestyle stationery’, i.e. stationery that looks nice and is ‘trendy’. In the photo above you can see some of the cheaper fountain pens they sell: Monami Olikas and fake Hero Safaris (they look like Safaris, but instead of Lamy the brand name Hero is embossed on the barrel).

Sisyphe Fountain Pens

They also sell more formal looking, more expensive fountain pens (on the right in the photo above and in the photo below). These days glass dip pens also seem to be popular in Shanghai (on the left in the photo above ).

Sisyphe Fountainpens

I like bookstores in Shanghai. Many have a very similar choice of stationery to each other, but you can often find new and different stationery – and the stationery always tends to be presented in a nice way.

Coming soon: More blog posts about stationery in Shanghai.

  1. Unfortunately the Carl’s Jr. (a fast food chain from Los Angeles), which used to be on the same floor as this bookstore has disappeared from the shopping mall. [↩]

Stein, Lamy and two pencil museums (one real, one fake)

 in Seen in the wild  tagged BBC / James Ward / Johnny Vegas / Keith Houston / pencil museum / Radio 4 by

Today: another Seen In The Wild blog post, but this time with a twist: at the end there’s some Heard In The Wild…

Stein

The Stein in the title of this blog post is not linked to Stein bei Nürnberg, where Faber-Castell’s headquarter is. The first part of this blog post is about Rick Stein, a famous British TV chef. In his latest BBC series, he explores Mexico. As usual, he writes down recipes. In his series about China, he used a pencil, shown in a previous blog post. This time he used a Lamy Safari (open images in new tab for high resolution).

       

    

(Images © BBC)

Lamy

He’s not the only celebrity using affordable Lamy pens in public: Nick Hewer, from the UK version of The Apprentice does so, too. In reality, people using Lamys in public are a rare sight, at least where I live. I remember seeing someone from a British university (but who is not British) using a Lamy Safari Lime Green Fountain pen at an SAP course I attended in Ireland in 2008. In recent years I have (twice) seen Chinese students using Lamy Safaris at my University/employer. If I add it up I have to say that I’ve only seen Lamys being used three times, in the last ten years, on the British Isles, but all three times the user wasn’t British. Parker on the other hand… if I wanted to count Parkers I’ve seen in the wild, that would be a very high number.

Two Pencil Museums (One Real, One Fake)

Since we were talking Rick Stein and British TV: There seems to be this idea that museums, and most of all pencil museums, are very boring. This seems to be a recurring theme, especially in comedies and sitcoms.

Here’s an animated gif from a very recent episode of a TV show with Johnny Vegas: Home from Home.

(Image © BBC)

In another show of his, Travel Guides (episode Lake District, 2015) from ITV, there’s a conversation spoken in very ridiculing tone:

I can’t believe this is a museum on pencils.
Really.
This is the only pencil museum in the world.
Ha ha ha! No shit.
Back to the BBC. In episode Black Eye of the BBC comedy Coming of Age (2010) there’s even audience laughter to make sure the viewer understands that going to a pencil museum is a ridiculous thing sane people wouldn’t dream off.
Imagine all the lovely places I’ll be able to drive you.
Like the pencil museum! Ooh!
Imagine that, Jas. Pencil museum.
Wow. What a treat(!) (Audience laughs)
Let’s speed things up a bit: Movie Sightseers (2012)
Pencil Museum.
I know how much you wanted to see that(!).
In case you are wondering about the exclamation mark in brackets. In subtitles, at least in the UK, that’s a sign for irony or sarcasm.
..and back to the BBC. Grumpy Old Holidays (2006). Please don’t forget to imagine the ridiculing voice when you read this. The idea is no one would go there unless the weather is horrible.
I have something to do with the weather, I am the rain goddess. They always say to me, “The farmers will be so grateful.” And I say, “Fuck the farmers.”
The Keswick Pencil Museum in Keswick must have, you know, oh, they must
look out of the window every day at the Pencil Museum and go, “Look at that, you can see the isobars “huddling together, we’ve got five days of continuous rain and storms coming- ker-ching!” Because, God bless it, your first port of call on holiday wouldn’t be a pencil museum, would it, normally?
There are hundreds of lovely rainy day attractions and activities like this to immerse yourself in.
It’s not like it’s just pencils. It’s different coloured pencils. It’s different sized pencils. Pencils you can pencil with, even.
Well, I enjoyed my trip to the pencil museum, read more about it in this 2012 blog post. This ‘making fun of the pencil museum’ isn’t new, last year I mentioned an occurrence that happened on BBC radio.

..but now people even invent fake pencil museums to make fun of when they are in a place without a pencil museum. In this case Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. For their Amazon show The Grand Tour they were in Luzern in Switzerland. They need a museum that incorporates boredom while they visit a chess museum so they pretend there’s a pencil museum near Luzern. The point in this episode is that no one would go there, but the museum supposedly has a charging point for Richard Hammond’s electric car, that’s why he keeps dragging them to boring museums.

(Image © W. Chump & Sons / Amazon Studios)

(Image © W. Chump & Sons / Amazon Studios)

Well, let’s end on a positive note: Keith Houston, the author of Shady Characters (2013) had his recent book The Book: A Cover-to-cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time presented as Radio 4’s book of the week. For the next few weeks, you can listen to all episodes online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b2hr55.

Well, the BBC is a multifaceted being and while one part makes fun of boring things another one makes fun of boring things as well but supports them. In this case James Ward’s series The Boring Talks. You can find more about James Ward in these previous blog posts.

The image in this blog post has been taken from different sources, as attributed under the images. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Dangerous Pencils and Fountain Pens 9

 in Fountain pens / Pencils / Seen in the wild  tagged Bosch / Plane / Sky News by

What a cruel world:

In the real world…

…people seem to be taking planes hostage with fountain pens.

Look at this headline from Sky News:

An Air China flight had to be diverted after a passenger held a crew member hostage using a fountain pen as a weapon.

Picture from Sky News (Image © Sky News)

In the fictional world…

..people seem to get tortured with pencils. In the TV series Bosch this pencil is referred to as the Black Guardian Pencil.

You might think the torture is down to the pencil being so scratchy – or so overpriced and doesn’t keep it’s point …but the fictional world is far more physical when it comes to stationery torture.

Last chance to look away…

Bosch: The Black Guardian Pencil

Bosch: The Black Guardian Pencil

 

The images in this blog post have been taken from Sky News and from the second episode of the fourth season of the TV series Bosch. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Dave’s Kaweco

 in Fountain pens / Kaweco / Seen in the wild  tagged Dave / Kaweco / Perkeo / Red Dwarf by

Is it just me or does there seem to be a mysterious link between Kaweco and Red Dwarf, a British Sci-Fi comedy?

In my Kaweco Prototype blog post from two years ago I had a “This blog post has been brought to you by Kryten and the Jupiter Mining Corporation” message (for fun), but when the latest Red Dwarf series aired last autumn the intro video from Red Dwarf current home, TV station Dave (part of UKTV), featured the newly released Kaweco Perkeo.

Mysterious, especially since Kaweco isn’t exactly a high street brand in the UK. Maybe in the future Kaweco will become part of the Jupiter Mining Corporation.

One of the images from the old blog post

I guess the conclusion to draw here is that creatives, like the ones making UKTV’s intro videos, like a good pen, in this case a Kaweco.

..and now for something completely different (in case you haven’t heard yet): WHSmith bought CultPens.

A Noris Pencil Case 5

 in Seen in the wild  tagged Amazon / Noris / Staedtler Noris by

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Staedtler’s Noris…

…so I was very excited to see that there’s a Noris pencil case!

Noris Pencil Case (Image copyright probably Staedtler)

I first thought this a UK only set, but when I checked Amazon US I saw that it is also available in the USA.

There are even different sets with different pens.

Noris Pencil Case (Image copyright probably Staedtler)

You can find one of the UK versions here and the US version here and here.

 

By the way, Daan De Winter’s Noris in the Belgian TV series Professor T. is visible in many episodes. It is also used to remove the seal of a crime scene and for other tasks. Nice.

The screenshot/animated GIF in this blog post has been taken from Episode One of Season One of the original Professor T. TV series. I believe that the use of Staedtler’s image shown in this blog post and the use of the animated GIF from Professor T. falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.