Specialty Stationery & Pen Shop Website Design: Proprietor Essay Homepage Archetype

The Hi-Uni pencils arrived on a Tuesday in early January, three dozen boxes of them, each graded from 2H through 10B. I had been waiting for this shipment since October. Mitsubishi allocation to the US market runs thin by autumn, and the retailer I work with in California goes on hold before the holidays. When the box landed on the counter I sat down and sharpened one before I did anything else.

January is the best month to be in the shop. The tourists are gone. The regulars come in the way people come into a room at home, without ceremony. Thomas was in last week to refill his Sailor 1911 with Diamine Damson, a purple so dark it reads as black until you hold the paper at an angle. He has been coming in since we opened. He brought coffee.

I started this shop because I spent ten years buying books for a small chain of independent stores and I kept noticing that the people who cared most about what they read also cared about how they wrote. Not performatively, not to have a beautiful desk for photographs, but because the friction of a good pen on good paper does something to the pace of thinking. I wanted to be the place that stocked those things without condescension.

Right now I am excited about two things: the Hobonichi Weeks planner, which has quietly become one of the most practical notebooks I carry, and a new stock of Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth pencils from the Czech Republic. Both are in the shop now. If you are looking for one thing to give yourself or someone else before February, the Hardtmuth 1500 grades are worth your attention.

Come by when the light is good. It usually is.

Margaret