Looking for last-minute present ideas for Christmas? If you’re flying by the seat of your pants and trying to beat Santa and Rudolph to the post, why not look for some special stationery for friends and family? Here are 5 reasons why stationery is the solution to your shopping dilemmas: There are a lot of […]
How’s your handwriting? Did your teachers make you practise hard as a child to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s? Learning joined up writing, especially with a grown up fountain pen, has been a tradition in UK schools for at least a century or two! And most of us probably appreciate a beautifully written […]
In the hardships of the trenches of World War I, what kept our soldiers going? In horrible circumstances, handwritten letters from loved ones back home helped lift men’s spirits. And even today, handwritten letters have great emotional significance. No one wants a love letter by email – it needs to arrive by snail mail, written […]
Calling all budding writers! Can you write a novel in a month? It might sound impossible, but the first draft of historical novel Water for Elephants – now a film on general release- was written by Sara Gruen in just 30 days. Gruen wrote the book as part of National Novel Writing Month- and this […]
Probably the shortest story ever written was allegedly by Ernest Hemingway and read: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. Brevity in prose has now found its niche with the rise of a new literary genre – flash fiction. The name was first used back in the 90s as the title to an anthology of very […]
Jared Fanning has designed an infographic showing the most read books in the last 50 years – that is, if reading correlates with sales. The numbers represent the quantity printed and then sold, rather than print figures alone. Not surprisingly, The Bible comes first, with 3,900,000 copies sold in the last 50 years. (But read?). […]
A perfume has been launched that makes wearers smell like “freshly printed books.” Paper Passion is a fragrance by Geza Schoen in association with publisher Gerhard Steidl and iconic design mag WallPaper*. Karl Lagerfeld and Steidl provide packaging. “The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world,” says Karl Lagerfeld. […]
Someone has typed out Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick on six rolls of toilet Paper for a bet. As the seller on ebay explains, “My friend and I once joked that toilet Paper should have instructions printed on them for certain people. One day, the conversation grew from there and turned into a wager […]
Today it’s the turn of the SIMbook notebook from Spinning Hat. The SIMbook is styled after the rather more recent SIM card, making it an apt place to store your telephone numbers, in a “ha ha”, knowing way. Cue marketing: “Get all your phone data backed up in one of our funky iconic SIM style […]
We Are Supervision has shown off a lesser known snippet of Chicago’s history: Gang cards. Apparently it was common practice ca. 1980 for Chicago gangs to put together their own business cards to impress, intimidate, whatever. It’s a bit of outsider history with a homespun aethetic. The names of the members are often included. We […]
How to plan the office Christmas party Whether you count down the days, or desperately scrabble around for an excuse not to go, the office Christmas party is an event on almost every company’s calendar. So, how do you plan a party that everyone will enjoy? It’s a tricky balance to get Bob from Accounts […]
Top tips to improve your time management skills Despite what people say, time is not a commodity. It cannot be traded, expanded or reduced. It is fixed. Our perception of time, however, is another concept. How often do you think at 4pm “Where has the day gone?” and go into panic mode to try to […]
Planning in business is essential Everything from the monthly sales drive to a new product launch or project needs planning. It promotes joined-up thinking and good decision-making throughout the whole organisation. “A goal without a plan is just a wish”, observed the famous writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, summing up a key business principle. Each business […]
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