Who (at least among writers) doesn’t have a sneaky weakness for a stationery shop? I know I’m not the only one who can never resist the temptation to wander up and down, looking at the array of pads and pens and pencils, and indexing files and labels… I have to confine the essential stationery shopping I do for the unmentionable day job to a quick run round the pound shop for a couple of the dullest, most uninspiring A4 refill pads and maybe a pack of cheap pencils, or I’d spend far more of the time and money which are, as ever, in short supply.
When I was a teen, writing shit poetry and indifferent, Mary-Sue-ish sci fi or hugely derivative thrillers (which also invariably featured a very special teenage girl who looked exactly as I wished I looked and was irresistible to all the heroes, who looked like whichever rock star or actor I fancied at the time) I had a just-as-predictable obsession with getting a new notebook and new pens whenever I got it into my head to start a new epic. If I had no access to a stationery shop, or no pocket money left that week, I would get thoroughly stressed out on the grounds that starting the Brand New Thing in the back of one of my growing bundle of half-empty exercise books in which previous attempts had feebly petered out would doom the new one to a similar fate.
I was right about that in many ways – none of my adolescent efforts were ever going to be anything like publishable. I’m actually very glad that I did all that hopeless, fevered scribbling in the days before there was anything like Kindle Direct or Lulu, or fuck knows what kind of trail of humiliating crap would be lurking in the depths of the internet. At least I only sent typescripts to publishing houses, who kindly sent them back (if any of them did keep copies to laugh at over drunken lunches, at least I never knew about it.)
Where I was probably wrong was in assuming that stationery possesses magical powers of its own. The times I have actually succumbed to the temptation of the beautiful bound notebook, the superlatively shiny pen or pack of HB pencils with lovely pictures on their shafts, I have either been too scared to use the Lovely Shiny Things for what might turn out to be crap, or what has been written in them has been partly written on the back of envelopes as well. It really, really isn’t the tools you use that make the difference.
These days, my handwriting is deteriorating on a daily basis, so I do pretty much everything on a laptop. I think this makes it entirely reasonable that I am beginning to develop a fetish for vintage typewriters…