Stunning stationery, and the lost art of letter writing

I've always wanted to be a 'woman of letters', someone who can write long newsy letters about day-to-day nothings and the weather. I've been reading about C.S. Lewis recently (there is a forthcoming blog in that, I promise), and Lewis was a great letter-writer who could get away with writing about things like snow:

"We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it and then the rime coming out of the air and making thick woolly formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening--for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white--the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead."

I can't help thinking the pace of life is a bit too fast for me to bother writing lengthy descriptions of weather (besides, Australia's sticky summers don't inspire the same poetic style), but I have enlisted Florentine Australia to help me get inspired to write letters to distant friends. They're based in Sydney, but they also have an online store with reliable delivery.

Last year I bought a dip pen, along with a wax seal with my initials on it, and was delighted by the quality of both the products and the customer service. Florentine's commitment to customer satisfaction became apparent when I received an email saying that unfortunately one of the products I had requested was currently out of stock. I had two choices: I could wait a week for the product to arrive (they would send the rest immediately, of course), or I could have another, more expensive product in its place.

Here's the pen of which I am now the proud owner:

To complement my set, I received a blotter for my birthday. Now all I need is an inkwell!

It certainly has been a pleasure using beautiful notepaper, dipping my pen into ink and listening to the the slight scratch as my pen moves across the surface of the paper. Letter-writing has become a tactile experience I really enjoy. Now, to find something to write about which isn't already known to my friends via facebook.

Personalized Stationery?

Apologies for the short break in posting. The past week has been rather involved, so I hope you will forgive me!

I very much can't afford (and very much don't need) personalized engraved stationery, but I still had fun designing it at the Smythson website.

Who doesn't want their envelopes lined with tissue paper?

The joys of a new notebook

I've mentioned my love of notebooks before, but I don't think I made it quite clear how much I love notebooks! In the absence of a diary, my notebooks are the quiet carriers of my day to day thoughts and inspirations. I use notebooks for everything.

I have notebooks for:

• Lists (what to pack, what to do today, people to call, things that are bugging me, things to buy, etc.) - these are my mongrel notebooks, the ugliest, most functional ones which end up with random addresses, phone numbers, mathematical calculations and automatically allocated internet passwords scrawled into them.


• Ambitions - well, I only have one of these. I write down my most important ambitions, just for a place to keep them. (Go to Egypt; Learn to bake bread; Become a good essayist; etc.) This one is a lovely, cloth bound notebook with a silk tie. It lives on my desk.


• Thoughts on books - of course. The larger kind of notebook, pretty but functional.


• Random venting - for those times I wish I kept a diary. I hope that when I'm gone, somebody does me the service of burning these because most of the time, I only write down the things that aren't worth remembering. This is the only use I have for large notebooks.


• Quotations - I have a quotation fetish. I collect them. And for this, I reserve the tiniest, most beautiful notebooks I own.

Paperblanks makes gorgeous notebooks. I also picked up one today by a new Australian brand called Rasberry- keep an eye out for them.

The strangest thing about my notebook obsession is that I never finish using one. The last quarter or so is always blank. I think this is because they're so personal, so attached to my day-to-day life that when I move to a new place mentally, I can't stand to keep using the same old notebooks.

No two I own are the same.