Ippitsu-sen

“Ippitsu-sen (一筆箋)” refers to a Japanese type of letter-writing pad of a specific size, of around 18 cm by 8 cm, often with guidelines to facilitate vertical or horizontal writing. I picked some up a long time ago, without even realizing what it was, and it was only recently that I learned it had a name and a specific function. I think the name means “one-line paper,” as when we say, “Drop me a line.” It probably corresponds to the Western greeting card (especially those smaller, unadorned ones that use thinner paper), but this is lighter, more ethereal, somehow less formal. This straddles the delicate middle ground between a card and a full-sized letter writing sheet.

Ippitsu-sen is meant for short messages, usually accompanying a gift, small souvenirs, business papers or samples, or things being returned to the original owner. You know, for those occasions when it’s just more polite to attach a note. The stationery firm Midori has a tutorial page on how to write ippitsu-sen, and it turns out that there is actually very little space to write down anything personal, because opening greetings take up one line, closing greetings another(“I hope for your favorable consideration,” etc.), and that’s already two lines out of a possible three or four – which probably comes as a relief for people who have to write them. So while the format seems casual (I don’t think it even needs an envelope), the content can be pretty formulaic.

Anyway, the one below is my favorite, because the loose square guidelines mean it can be used either vertically or horizontally. I was amused to find that Tsuchihashi-san had the same notepad in his article introducing ippitsu-sen for men (read non-flowery).

The square grid is also evocative of manuscript pads used by writers and journalists in both Japan and Korea (I’m curious whether the Chinese use them too). One square holds one letter, punctuation mark, or space. It’s been quite some time since the process was digitized and people started writing on computers and word processors, but industry people still refer to the length of an article by the number of 200-letter manuscript sheets it takes up (“word count” being a very Western concept).

This is another ippitsu-sen sized pad from Pilot. However, I was told (and I agree) that the paper is not particularly fountain pen friendly ;)

And this would be the stereotypical ippitsu-sen, with flowery illustrations and vertical lines. I think my mother bought this. It seems like the vast majority of ippitsu-sen users are women, and it can be hard to find something neutral and muted. I’m definitely going to add more to my collection if I have the chance.

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The Secret Lives of Colour

Happy new year to you all! I was hoping to get a couple of posts up before the year was over, but they ended up in the Drafts folder as I feared, as the past week has been particularly busy. It has been a bright and sunny Christmas and New Year’s down here, there is no snow and no hunkering down in the cold, and children are on summer vacation. We spent New Year’s Eve at the beach. It is all very pleasant but I have a sneaking feeling that the season in the northern hemisphere is more suitable for some quiet reflection at year’s end, the turning of pages, and (most important) the ceremony of starting a new diary.

Kassia St. Clair’s new book, The Secret Lives of Colour, has kept me entertained throughout the holidays. It’s a collection of short essays on 75 colors (pigments, dyes and even shades associated with precious metals or stones, like gold or amber), laying out the history and interesting facts about each, such as when it was fashionable and why it was prized. When I first started buying colored pencils, it was their mysterious, romantic names as much as their shades or manufacturing history that captivated me: Naples yellow, heliotrope, celadon green, Prussian blue, Payne’s grey. The book is by no means exhaustive, as a color is sometimes allotted only a couple of pages. But if you have ever found such names beautiful, and if your interest in stationery and the larger world has an anthropological bent, you might find it worth reading. The hardcover is only available in the UK at the moment but comes out later this year in the US.

Telephone Pencils In Action

It’s been a while! I’ve been a bit under the weather lately, due to a sudden onset of homesickness, and the relentlessly depressing news from home and abroad hasn’t helped. Although I’m a bit too lazy and optimistic by nature to become a full-blown depressive, these moods do come over me once in a while, usually some months after settling in a new place. All that moving takes a toll. Especially in the past couple of weeks, it feels as though all I’ve been doing is watching the news and wishing I was back home doing candle waves with everybody else. 

However, life goes on, and I rely more than ever on my pens, pencils and books for the “small but sure joys” of everyday life, as Haruki Murakami so aptly put it. I recently started watching the Netflix series “The Crown,” which pen-lovers will have a field day with as everybody from Churchill to the newspaperman writes with some kind of vintage fountain pen, but which is proving to be a harder nut to crack for pencil lovers. However, I did catch a telephone pencil in action in Episode 6.

This is where the switchboard operators put through a call from Princess Margaret in Rhodesia to Queen Elizabeth at Sandringham. Telephone pencils are often shown with rings attached to the end, but here we see another kind of ‘phone pencil in action that has some kind of ball tip “used to dial the telephone number, saving finger nails.”

If anyone else is watching the series, let’s all keep an eagle eye on those secretarial pools and desks for more pencils! 

Addendum 11/15: Gunther has sent me an amazing thread on the Classic Rotary Phones Forum that has pictures of more telephone pencils. The ball tips are referred to as “dialers” that conform to the Bell System. Wow! Thank you Gunther :)

Happy Halloween!

My son always brought back a pencil for each Halloween we spent in Canada. I have to say, it wasn’t the ideal place to celebrate the occasion since it was always freezing around trick-or-treat time (the children had to wear coats over their fancy dress), but Canadian parents go to exraordinary lengths to put up a good show, complete with audio and special effects. I salute them!

The birthday pencils were special too. The French certainly helps :)

Stationery Shopping in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires, city of 3 million people, the Paris of South America. We visited the city for three days last week. I don’t know if BA had its own Baron Haussmann at one point, but the wide, wide boulevards, stately mansions, and leafy parks did indeed remind one of the French capital. It was fun being in a big city again!

There were even pencils in front of the Casa Rosada (the pink-toned Presidential Palace).

This time I had the opportunity to visit some bookstores, stationers and pen shops. Bookshops in BA are alive and well, and both the big, established chains (El Ateneo, Cúspide) and the smaller independent stores seem to be thriving, at least compared to those in other countries. It was great to see the “neighborhood bookstore” still alive.

For my pen searches, I relied on this list I dug up online before the trip (¡Gracias!). The first one on the list, Casa Pintos, seems to have closed (there was a new building at that address on Avenida de Mayo), but I hit the jackpot at Librería Catalinas. It was a delightful store chock-full of deluxe art supplies (Caran d’Ache sets!) and both current and vintage pens. They carried Parker (including a shelfful of vintage 51’s), Pelikan, Faber-Castell, Lamy, Cross, Sheaffer, Caran d’Ache, some Visconti, and I forget what else. Granted, the stock isn’t huge compared to a pen shop in Europe or Asia, but I tend to have a high opinion of stationers who carry Pilot Parallel pens. If we were to live in BA for any length of time I would undoubtedly be making regular pilgrimages to this shop.

Judging from the display, it looked like Catalinas had been in business for a long time. The most intriguing item in this store was a box of vintage Staedtler jumbo pencils – the owner’s personal collection, and not for sale. They allowed me to take a picture though :)

I also spotted some vintage pencils in a couple of stalls at the awesome San Telmo antiques market. Several Johann Fabers and some Argentinian Van Dykes, mostly colored. I would have picked some up but due to a miscalculation we had no cash on us and couldn’t buy anything. If I ever get another chance to come here I will work through this neighborhood again – porteños don’t seem to throw anything away, and the most amazing stuff comes out of those stately old homes!

My stationery souvenirs from BA are mainly notebooks. Speaking of notebooks, there is one mystery about this city I cannot figure out – there are no Moleskines or Paperblanks or any other internationally known paper brand to be found anywhere. I’m not saying that Moleskine is so great that every nation on earth should import it, but rather that this brand and several others like it have so taken over the world that it is nearly impossible to escape it – and I wonder why this country in particular should be out of the loop. Every time I saw a Moleskine-like rotating display in a bookshop I made a beeline for it, but it always turned out to be a lookalike called BRÜGGE. (I think the line is manufactured in China, but I’m not 100% certain.) The notebooks I did get are both made in Argentina.

This is a notebook in my favorite format: spiral-bound, square grid, lots of pages. The paper feels above average, but I won’t be too disappointed if it bleeds or feathers. One advantage of being a pencil user is that you become much more tolerant of various kinds of paper.

The pencils are both unfamiliar variants of familiar brands. I actually got the Brazilian-made Eco in place of a one-peso change at a bookstore; Argentinians hate small change and will go to some lengths to avoid dealing in coins.

The second is a regular lined and banded notebook, but with cute illustrations inside, from a brand called Monoblock. I don’t know if I’ll actually be using this notebook for anything; this is just a souvenir to remember the city’s great cafés and pastries by :)

The last item of note is marketed as an iPad case, but I have something different in mind. The factors that make Argentina one of the best places in the world to have a steak in also enable it to produce a lot of leather, and BA is known for its multitude of leather-goods shops selling jackets, shoes, bags, wallets, etc. Now, I’ve always wanted a leather desk pad that cushions sheets of paper against a fountain pen nib, ever since I saw one back in Seoul (the brand was Italian). BA shops carry that too – aptly named carpetas para escritorio – but they were too large, and often too complicated (with lids, sleeves, gilt-edged corners etc.). I wanted a smaller pad that was more portable, like a leather clipboard without the clip. And this is just the right size, and at around US$43, quite a bargain I think. (I might still work myself up towards a proper carpeta in the future.) 

And, with all that leather in search of a purpose, I certainly hope the artisans across the river will be interested enough to make other stationery-related articles in the future – notebook covers, pencil sleeves, pencases, and heck, why not sharpener cases? :)

Pencil Therapy

An effective round of pencil therapy consists of:

1. Gathering a bunch of pencils to sharpen,

2. Adding them to a pot of fresh points (instant coffee is optional), and

3. Hoarding some good pencils to sharpen on a rainy day (aka delayed gratification).

The thing is, there’s been so many rainy days lately – it’s been raining solidly, relentlessly, for a week now and shows no signs of abating. I fear my stock will not last long :(

A (Not Very Good) Pencil Pot

This is my current pencil pot, as a rejoinder to the fun “Pencil Pot of the Month” series over at Bleistift.  I don’t have that many pots to show, and this one is not ideal for pencils either because points tend to get caught in the strap.  But it does hold a lot of pencils (it has four compartments), is lined with something like felt inside, and faux leather outside. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I believe I bought this at Ito-ya :)

An Obvious Idea, Seldom Seen in Practice

…pencil clips!

Somebody get him a better pencil… (2)

A while ago I mentioned Haruki Murakami’s fondness for F pencils. Well, I’ve recently discovered that photos of his library have been available on his official American website for some time now. Thus on his desk one can see… the modern yellow scourge. Sigh.

P.S. Murakami’s Japanese publisher is putting up a special website from January 15th until the end of the month, where the author takes (some) questions from readers. The webpage itself is in Japanese but questions in English are accepted.

Varieties of Pencil Collecting

As I make the rounds of stationery and pencil blogs, I am discovering that there are differences between pencil users and pencil collectors. I am also belatedly discovering that, among the latter, there are many more kinds of collecting than I had ever imagined possible. The more I read, the more I am convinced that I will never qualify as a collector – I don’t understand buying pencils one will never use, and I also don’t understand collecting pencils as memorabilia – that is, buying them for the imprint more than the quality of wood or lead used. But this kind of collecting actually seems to be in the majority. One surprise I had upon browsing the classified section of the Pencil Pages (run by a member of the American Pencil Collectors Society, I think) was that there were a lot of people looking for Yikes! pencils. They were unfamiliar to me so I looked them up.

Yikes pencils!! I mean, really? I am flabbergasted but on the other hand I kind of understand their sentimental appeal – but still, I’m not sure whether I would collect the kind of pencils I actually used during my middle and high school years, well first of all because they are hard to find now (more than the Yikes pencils I would say – everything in Korea seems to have a very short shelf life), and because, well, they look like this.

The Mitsubishi pencils I wrote about last time were from my elementary school years; I have very few left from the period following that because I used mechanical pencils a lot more than pencils, and what pencils I had I used up pretty quickly. So the pencils I do have now are probably the ones I didn’t manage to get to till graduation, or possibly ones that I saved because they were precious for some reason. I don’t remember using any of the pencils pictured above, except for the Silvexa that is peeling so badly now – I think I was quite taken with it at some point. I also went through quite a lot of mark sheet pencils out of necessity – all exams were done on OMR sheets – and they were quite good, dark and smooth. (The Munhwa Deojons pictured above are a recent acquisition; they are manufactured in China now. I only have a stub of the Korean-made “for computers” B pencil left.) I regret not having had the chance to develop any youthful affection for Castell 9000s or Lumographs early on – they were simply not available then, although they are everywhere now. Japanese pencils were an exception; they were and still are widely available, especially Tombows.

One interesting custom in Korea is that pencil boxes often carry the date of manufacture, so it is very easy to date them (if one can find old pencils at all, that is). The “Farm Story” pencil was manufactured in December of 1986.

By the way, if I were to collect fountain pens for sentimental reasons, I would start with the West German Super-Rotaxes. For some reason they were all over Korea in the mid-80’s, and I distinctly remember I had a turquoise one and another in a different color. The plastic body cracked eventually, but it was a very pretty pen and I really felt like a grownup using it. I wonder if anyone who grew up in Germany (or anywhere else, for that matter) remember them too?