Stationery pattern

I found myself buying quite a bit of stationery recently. The nice thing is, even premium stationery lines are cheap compared to computers or photography, my other capital-intensive hobbies. A top of the line solid sterling silver pen like the Waterman Edson LE will not break the $1000 barrier, when you can’t even buy a handbag for that price from most luxury brands.

I spent four years in a Catholic school in Versailles, a very conservative city, where we were not allowed to use ball point pens because they deform handwriting. I used Sheaffer pens back then, and all the way to college. When I started working, I splurged on an Edson Blue, but what with computers and email, seldom got to use it.

There is a kind of fashion phenomenon brewing around Moleskine notebooks and journals, including an aficionado website (of which I was a charter contributor). Their Italian manufacturer concocted a clever marketing campaign to give them a cosmopolitan aura of travel mystique, branding them as “The Legendary Notebook as used by Van Gogh, Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse and C