Looking back

I know it’s not a new idea, but I still find it amazing that websites are here today, changed and then gone tomorrow. Printed matter is kept and archived away for ever more, but websites are changed and lost. How will we look back and understand what the style of 2012 was when we get to 2022? What did this website look like last year, let alone 10 years ago? I have always kept my library of the changes because I have been aware of the changing nature of websites, and how even small changes accumulate to become big changes over time. I have now come across wayback.org which does the job properly and keeps a very extensive and just slightly addictive archive of seemingly any website you can think of.

I am building our own library up of old websites and catalogues and more, and will find the right way to post it all online soon.

 

National Stationery Day

Tuesday 24th April

We’ve been plastering this one everywhere we can – on our website, on Twitter, on Facebook and our email footers. We are running a prize draw and free gift offer on the day itself. It’s a wonder we haven’t been reduced to wearing T-Shirts and having it tattooed for good measure (we are based in Camden, home of the tattoo after all). Rest assured we have stopped at promoting it online.

It is the first such day, and I don’t normally even give so much as a raised eyebrow for most such events  – National Salt Awareness Week anyone? No, well you missed that one back in March, so how about National Tree Dressing Day? It’s in December so don’t say you haven’t got ample warning. I am fully aware that to most people, a National Stationery Day is little better. An interest to keep quiet about, not go public, but a lot of people do love their stationery, and I’d like to bet that most people who work in offices have hung around the stationery cupboard a little too long for their own good to check out the latest Niceday delivery.

Why stationery? It’s practical, it’s useful, it’s small and collectable, it says ‘own me’, it says that it can change your life in some small way for the better because it will help you become organised. It is tactile and nice to hold, it can look pretty or just be boringly functional, but it will always offer a world of possibilities. After all, once the electricity goes off, we want to know where we put the candles and soon afterwards you’ll be looking for a pen and paper. So in it’s own little way, stationery exists in all our lives, and we should celebrate that little fact. By buying more stationery. From Bureau Direct, of course.

Job Vacancy

Corporate Sales Manager

We have just started advertising for someone to run ourCorporate Sales business – an opportunity to spearhead the Corporate (B-2-B) business which sits alongside our Mail Order (B-2-C) business. The nature of the business is to supply corporate clients with stationery for promotional and presentation use.

http://jobs.thegrocer.co.uk/job/684558/corporate-sales-manager/

Memory Lane…

No 10 Great Newport Street

The original shop

Having been reminded of the days when we had a shop, long before we had a website, I thought I would dig out one of the few photos we have. This tiny photo is of the very early days when the shop was heavily colour-themed with Biella stationery as you walked in, and before the need to survive watered down the range a bit. Stationery at its purest, you might say. If I can find any more images I will post them.

Herbin pen – the update

Record breaking

In my last post I mentioned the Herbin pen and inks, and I then thought it might be a nice idea to feature it in our weekly email newsletter. I thought a few people would see what a bargain it was, but since Easter is our quietest time of the year I really didn’t see it going much further. How wrong I was! It turned out to be our busiest day ever on the website. A big Easter Bunny thank you to all those stationery addicts out there, and keep watching as we have so much more stationery to offer in the coming weeks.

New arrivals – Herbin pen

We love this pen – it is a really simple idea and one that really should be more widely available. The pen itself is a simple, clear-barrelled rollerball pen, and the secret is that it takes ink cartridges. Any universal ink cartridge will fit, and the real beauty is that Herbin themselves make small universal cartridges in a range of colours and these come in small metal tins. Put the pen and a selection of ink tins together and you have an a wonderful little set – get a pen and two tins for under £10 (at the time of writing!).

 

Rhodia heaven

We put up a new shelving rack this week (I know, big excitement here at Bureau Towers. No really, we were excited) and Jo neatly adorned it with Rhodia stock. Previously it was on some unsuitable shelving, but now it looks the part, so much so that I felt I had to share it with everyone. It is like the ultimate dream for a Rhodia lover – shelf after shelf of Rhodia pads and books. Oh to work in stationery, you’re thinking…

Colour overload

Rhodiarama books have arrived

All 15 Rhodiarama colours

The assorted box of all 15 of the new Rhodia Rhodiarama pocket notebooks has just arrived, and it is so tempting in its full set that I felt I had to share it. The colours are, left to right, black, chocolate, mocha, stone, anise, turquoise, sapphire, iris, purple, lilac, raspberry, poppy, tangerine, orange and daffodil. The books themselves are a pocket notebook, with a trademark orange Rhodia elastic strap and the renowned 90gsm vellum paper that everyone praises. Click here to see more.

J Herbin Inks

Fine inks for fountain pens

Herbin ink cartridges

We have just taken delivery of the wonderful Herbin inks. We used to sell these many, many years ago in our Covent Garden shop and for some reason they fell by the wayside. It’s a great shame as they are both good quality inks and beautifully presented.Still, we have made good the error of our ways and now offer J Herbin inks.

The universal cartridges come in little tins that you just know you want to own, and the inks come in a choice of wonderful colours. We also offer amazing scented inks that we can’t even begin to do justice to – the intense scent of the rose ink is like the most amazing turkish delight, and the violet has a rich and deep aroma.

Herbin ink chart

 

Our Man In Japan

An exotic new stationery venture into the unknown…

The box of stationery arrives...

Stationery may be an everyday item, but we all have a strange love for it, and a desire to collect and acquire more stationery in the search for the perfect notebook or an everyday item in an unusual colour. We also love the art of discovery, the idea that out there just round the corner lies something exciting and new. Combining these two ideas, we have come up with a new idea. Meet Our Man in Japan.

We have a stationery contact who now lives in Japan, and who knows us from the days back when we had a real shop. It’s very simple – he will find the most unusual stationery in Tokyo, hopefully not available here in the UK, and then bring it to you. We hope that each month a box of unexpected stationery will land on our doorstep.

Stocks will be very limited, and newsletter subscribers get the first word on what has arrived. If you want to be in this, click here to sign up for our newsletter, or we will also mention it on Twitter.

To give us a bit of an idea on why he chose the items he was sending over we asked for a bit of background to the stationery. What he said was:

“As a heavily populated city (the most populous metropolitan area in the world), most Tokyoites are squeezed together in hen coup housing and overspilling trains, and so prefer to protect privacy where they can. Books are covered to hide the the cover before they leave the store as the norm. Addresses are obscured with stamps or shredded for privacy and security as bin bags are necessarily transparent. The scissors are designed to be contained and concealed, ninja-like, within the confines of a pencil case, organiser pocket, etc, without taking up but a whisker of precious space. Space is a premium in Tokyo. The same goes for the micro pencils, with their tiny sharpener. There are so many consumers in Tokyo that manufacturers can afford to produce such a wide variety of paperclips and know there will be a market for each design/colour.”