Happy Chinese New Year of the Dragon

Happy Chinese (or Lunar) New Year! Goodbye Rabbit. Welcome Dragon.

To celebrate the occasion Caran d’Ache released a special version of the 849 ballpoint pen: the DRAGON Burgundy Special Edition.

It was/is sold out in most shops until new stock arrives, but luckily I was able to buy the last 849 Dragon pen from Papeterie Berlin.

If you look at the surface against the light you can see the different layers of paint. The pen looks really beautiful.

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Paper and Pen

My first order from Papier und Stift (translation: Paper and pen) came in. This online shop’s focus is on fountain pens, but there is also a nice selection of non-fountain-pen-stationery.

The main trigger for my order were notebooks with Tomoe River paper, but I couldn’t resist adding a few other small items. I also ordered their ‘magazine’ for €1, which is more of a catalogue than a magazine and features a selection of nice stationery they sell.

The ‘magazine’ reminds me to some extent of a catalogue I got from Carta Pura many years ago.

I scanned my 2010 Carta Pura catalogue recently and hope the company doesn’t mind me sharing it here. I will of course remove it if requested. Your browser should display the pdf below.
In case you wonder: I was very happy with my order and the delivery times.

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Miniature Calendar

Bleistift reader Tomasz Maped sent in another great find: Miniature Calendar. A web calendar with a miniature photo for every day. There is a big section on stationary-related photos.

You can find some nice examples below.

Copyright Tatsuya Tanaka
Copyright Tatsuya Tanaka
Copyright Tatsuya Tanaka

The images in this blog post has been taken from https://miniature-calendar.com/. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

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Hobonichi Techo 2024

Arrived today: my Hoboichi Techo for 2024.

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…

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