I found this in a 7-storey bookstore on Fuzhou Road. On the third floor, I passed beneath an arch bedecked with flashing lights and neon Stabilo stickers to enter the pen section. The salesladies had no English and I had no Mandarin, so we invented sign language for “No, not the rollerball, the fountain pen!” …
Month: April 2009
Better than the Cauliflower Festival, whose billboard waved goodbye to me as I was zooming towards Shanghai’s Pudong airport. I was in Shanghai for work, but was lucky enough to be billeted a five-minute walk away from Fuzhou Road. Fuzhou Road is shop after shop of books, office supplies, Chinese calligraphy supplies… and fountain pens. …
I don’t have too many matching sets. There’s a Waterman 100-year in red, and there’s this, a Conway Stewart Dinkie No. 526 with a matching No. 2R Â pencil. That’s about it. I imagine a lady carried these in a matching purse – oh, or even a reticule (I like that word, no one uses it …
Fear of women who bite off chicken heads for a living Posted via Pixelpipe.
 Like brush-and-ink doodling. (If you use a brush, does that still qualify as doodling?) Whilst performing triage on the cds in my drawer (if labelled, inspect; if unlabelled, drop into trash bin) I found one that had scans of comic strips from 13 years ago. I look at them now and think, I can’t …
Â
I have learned that an excellent way to mitigate Notebook Overpurchase Guilt (NOGuilt) is to write reviews of said notebooks. That way, every time I purchase yet another notebook I cannot possibly need, I feel like I am doing others a service. (Insert self-justification hurl here.) Out of such mental contortions a good thing occasionally …
First, it’s the name. “Blue Night” leads me to expect a dark blue, like an indigo touched with black. The label on the ink bottle doesn’t help. It is a deep night sky touched with purple light. The ink itself is gray, gray, gray. It is not Blue Night.
One of my favorite ink lines is CdA’s Colors of the Earth. I like the concept (colors inspired by nature) and the bottles (cubist crystal candy). My first favorite was Storm, a deep brownish purple, like the halo of a bruise. My second was Saffron, which is more intense dry than wet. Recently, I’ve been …