When in Shanghai, I like to visit Lamy stores. Unlike Lamy stores in Europe, they tend to offer lots of special editions. My best guess is that I am not only amazed by the quantity of these special editions but also by the quality.
Originally, I was trying to find two specific items: The Lamy Safari Field Green because it looks beautiful and the Hanzi nib because I want to experience how it writes. The Hanzi nib is made for writing Chinese script. I used Google Translate to translate an explanation into English, see below.
Unfortunately, the Field Green Safari was impossible to find in Shanghai: it was neither available in the Lamy stores, nor was it available on Chinese online market places. This came as a surprise because imported pens are often available via online market places at good prices – for example, it was easy and not expensive to get the uni-ball Signo Needle in Japan-exclusive colours. I also got the Pilot Custom Heritage 91 for a really good price.
Back to Lamy: On the trip to Shanghai last year, I bought three different special editions. I will write more about the Hanzi nib another time (spoiler, I got one), but today I want to show you another special edition: The Song Dynasty edition Safari in Jade White. There is also a Sky Blue version available, also very beautiful.
The Song Dynasty edition Lamy Safari
It also came with free engraving, so I made use of this offer. Below is a short video that shows how my pen got engraved. If you look at the barrel of the pen, you can see the characters appearing.
You can also see more of the pen and its packaging in the unboxing video below.
Another special edition is the Lamy Leben set, as seen in this advertising.
Pokemon sets were also still available, but I had already seen these at previous visits.
It’s always exciting to find new and unique editions when visiting Lamy stores in Shanghai. To be fair, they are usually just the same pen in a different colour, but if that colour appeals to me I am happy to add it to my collection. In this case the colour is beautiful like the griso and the cream Safari’s colour.
Today: another visit to Shanghai’s Baixin Stationery Store. This small [1]I think they have four branches. chain of stationery stores used to be called Baixin Bookstore, but they are now known as Baixin Stationery Store. One of their bigger stores is on Fuzhou Road, whereas this branch in Metro City, in Shanghai’s Xujiahui area, is their smallest branch.
I’ll try to use this blog post to recreate the experience of visiting this store ..so there’ll be lots of photos. If you are on a metered connection (i.e. you pay for the data) you might want to leave now and revisit this blog post when you are on a better Internet connection.
Stinky Tofu (yes, that’s the official name)
We (my wife, our kid and me) went to this Baixin branch after finishing our nice lunch (photo above) in the same building: at Shanghai Alley / Food Republic on Metro City’s top floor.
Baixin Stationery store
Despite it’s small size it has a lot of choice and you can always find special editions of pens there. Look carefully how small the shop is. This is not the entrance, but the whole shop! I don’t know how they managed to fit so much exciting stuff in there.
The employee was extremely knowledgable and helpful. A mix you don’t encounter often on the high street these days.
I bought one of my two Mannish line Pentel Orenz pencils there. Even though I am a big fan of the Orenz, I wasn’t too keen on the new special edition.
Pentel Orenz – Foxy Edition
More Mechanical Pencils
I am not sure whether this special edition of the Orenz mechanical pencil is aimed again at girls or whether there’s something more strange going on here. I’ll only show you the cover of Pentel’s brochure and the page with the pencils. Some other pages in the brochure are more extreme than the cover, so I omit them from this blog post.
Pentel Orenz Foxy brochure cover
Pentel Orenz Foxy brochure
This one is called Foxy (a cooperation with a Japanese artist). and was released in October 2017. There are six different designs and there are foxy themed lead refill containers available, too.
As is common in shops for ‘lifestyle stationery’ in Shanghai, there’s a big selection of Zebra’s Sarasa pens. Here’s a small selection of the Sarasa special edition corner.
Zebra Sarasa Special Editions
At home I am using Lihit Lab products on a daily basis, so I was happy to see that they are popular in Shanghai, too.
There were also other pencil cases I have seen before, like the Zip It line (pictured below) I got to know at the Insights X 2016. They are popular in the UK, too. So much so that cheap knock offs (£2 each) even made it into British shops.
Zip It Monster Pouch
..and there were more exciting mechanical pencils in another corner of this very small shop (pictured below). Here in Europe 0.5mm seems to be the norm and many companies, like Lamy and Graf von Faber-Castell, seem to move away from 0.5mm and shift their offers towards 0.7mm. I assume this must be down to customers preferring bigger lead diameters. Seeing a nice choice of 0.3mm mechanical pencils in Baixin certainly made me happy and gave me hope that small diameters are here to stay.
With so much nice stationery the Wopex is of course not missing from this store either. Many lifestyle stationery stores in Shanghai sell it.
If you want to try any of the pencils you can make use of Baixin’s sharpening station, which is basically an empty drink bottle with a sharpener screwed on top. I didn’t see the sharpener screw top for sale, though.
Since we’re talking about sharpeners: let’s move on to wood cased pencils and how to protect them. It was nice to see the Hi-uni pencil caps in real life. I read about them in the past, but never saw them on the high street in the UK.
Some of the erasers on sale looked very exotic.
Chinese inks are not that popular in the west (or should that be ‘not yet’), so it was nice to see some new Chinese inks I hadn’t seen in previous years.
Starry Ink
Kokuyo makes some great products. My favourite are their stapleless staplers, but I also like their paper. These multi purpose scissors were new to me.
Kokuyo also had this new product which reminded me very much of the Col-O-Ring.
The employee told us that six months ago Kokuyo started having problems getting the paper, so you can’t get this version with very nice paper anymore. There are still similar products from Kokuyo, but with inferior paper.
Schneider pens have been in Shanghai for many years. When I first saw them it seemed to come as a surprise, because they are not that popular in the UK (which is so much closer to their country of origin).
There was also an abundance of masking tape and related accessories…
..as well as other, more general accessories.
This being Shanghai ‘high tech’ stationery, like this bluetooth printer, is also popular.
It’s using thermal paper like a fax machine and people don’t only use it to print black and white versions of their phone’s photos and cute stickers and images (you can even get lace paper for it) – according to the employee of this store it’s also being used to print to do lists in schools, for the pupils to take home.
What a great shop. I wish there was something similar closer to where we live.
Since we are talking about Kaweco anyway: If you subscribe to my YouTube channel you have noticed my series of mechanical pencil reviews. Here’s a look at Kaweco’s mechanical pencil from the Special series. I will introduce this series of videos at some point in the future, but I thought with today’s topic being Kaweco this video can act as a quick preview to my new video series.
Recently, my wife told me about the following Valentine’s Special from Kaweco China. As I haven’t seen anything about this set yet in the West I thought I share the details with you.
It includes a pen for her (in the Strawberry Pink colour) and one for him either blue or green.
Her pen comes can be used as a clutch pencil or you can insert the included ‘ballpoint pen lead’ to make it into a ballpoint. His is a fountain pen and you can pick from two colours, which look like the Retro Blue and Industrial Green I have shown in a previous blog post about Kaweco’s special colours for China, Taiwan, Macao and HongKong.
Early orders will get some additional postcards from America’s Rifle Paper Co.
The set also comes with a leather case and costs ¥520 (~$80; €65; £58).
Price and exchange rates: January 2018
I believe that the use of Kaweco’s image shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
You might have noticed that guest posts are few and far between on Bleistift, so it’s even more exciting when there is one. The one today is from my wife who you might have seen on Instagram and Twitter as Paperbound’s PingPing.
If you are into Kaweco’s special colours you might have come across the Al Sport in rosé gold which was available in Taiwan, Macao and HongKong. It’s simple, stylish, and yet sophisticated!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSTas83BC5F/
A couple of days ago I came across the exciting news of more special colours that Kaweco are releasing in Asia end of September. Sebastian Gutberlet has confirmed that for the first year these will only be available for the Chinese market. This means that in the future there’s the possibility that these colours will be released to the rest of the world.
There are three colours for the new release. They are (to my eyes): black blue for the Sport, grey green for the Sport, and red for the Al Sport. As a pocket pen lover, I use Kaweco’s (Al) Sport and Lamy’s Pico and compared the red colour of this latest edition with my lovely Lamy Pico in red. Well, from what I can tell, the Kaweco Al Sport is slightly lighter (pinkish) than the Lamy Pico, while still having the amazing sheen. Personally, I’d go for the red Al Sport ☺️.
I believe that the use of wfjsb’s image shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
