All of a sudden, our local stationery shop – the Write Stuff – has grown a shelf labelled ‘Letter Writing & Correspondence: Original Crown Mill’. And there, in ranks, are pads of beautiful writing paper – vellum and laid, cream or white, A4 or A5 – plus boxed writing sets, decorated top and bottom with flowers and/or butterflies. All with colourful envelopes to match. ‘Goodness!’ I said to Antonia, who owns the shop. ‘Who is writing letters these days?’ ‘The young,’ she said.
I was astonished and charmed. Immediately, I bought a pad of Original Crown Mill Laid (Finest quality since 1870) and decided to write to the granddaughter currently studying philosophy at York University, whom I rarely see or hear from. Actually, I have three grandchildren; two live nearby and, although I see them quite often, conversation is not their métier. So now I’m thinking letters, beginning with the York granddaughter.
The next time I was in the Write Stuff, Antonia was away – off to the London Stationery Show at the Business Design Centre – so I got chatting to one of her girls. Nicole is so loquacious and keen on paper that I could have adopted her. I learned that my initial notion – that the young were writing billet-doux to each other – wasn’t quite on the mark. More likely it is students, possibly lonely foreign students, writing to their mums and dads and wanting that Edinburgh postmark (though, according to a recent article in this very journal, they’d be lucky if it was delivered this side of Christmas). Anyway, the young like the pretty boxes of paper.
And the vellum and laid? ‘The vellum,’ said Nicole, ‘gives you a gliding experience’, whereas with the laid, which is textured, ‘you can feel what you’re doing’. It was all so tactile I could have bought up their stock. What was out of stock – and what they were waiting for, because it is so popular – was the MD paper: a Japanese paper with cotton content. It came bible-thin or thick, depending on how the surface had been treated, and ‘just soaks up ink from your fountain pen’. Fountain pen? You thought everyone had gone digital? Forget it. The Write Stuff sells at least one, maybe two, fountain pens a day. And there is a choice of 50 – yes, 50 – inks.
Paper isn’t that cheap, so who else, apart from poor students, is writing letters these days? Well, when it comes to important occasions, big or little – marriages, funerals, births, deaths – an email just won’t do. People take to the vellum or the laid and pen a personal letter. And, as Antonia (back from the Stationery Show) said: when parents receive a letter from their offspring, what does it do? They write back, of course.
Antonia was keen to direct my attention to all the pretty notebooks for journaling. Journaling? ‘It’s what young women are doing,’ she said
Antonia was keen to direct my attention to all the pretty notebooks for journaling. Journaling? ‘It’s what young women are doing,’ she said. She thinks it began post-Covid, when people became more inward – literally and metaphorically. ‘Journaling’, I read when I Googled it, is ‘a way to engage in self-expression, self-reflection and self-awareness’. It could be ‘a beneficial tool for improving mental health and managing stress and anxiety’. It has also become something of an art form. You can buy stickers, notebooks with dotted rather than lined paper, and cute stuff like softly coloured highlighters.
Actually, I’m something of a paper junkie myself. My favourite paper is a foolscap pad of lined yellow paper, preferably with a margin. The yellow wards off the terror that comes with a blank page of white, and the lines – well, keep me in line. The margins provide space for corrections and changes of mind. I have used these yellow pads ever since the day, some 30 years ago, I came upon Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Also from my past – going back to the days when I was a newspaper reporter – are the reporter’s spiral-bound notebooks. I love the way you can write front to back, then turn them over and write back to front. I have drawers full of them, some with a sticky label on the front, many only half full. One is a souvenir from Woolworths. In the days when I wrote letters to friends and lovers, the paper I loved was onion-skin airmail – so fragile, so ethereal, so from the soul. These days I can’t find it.
A week after I had posted my letter (vellum, laid) to my granddaughter, back came a reply. ‘Dear Granny D,’ she wrote. Then three nicely written pages telling me the campus is full of bunnies and ducks (it’s spring), and which philosophers she liked (I recognised Wittgenstein). She ended with lots of love and a nice little picture of a duck. I was absolutely delighted.
I have just bought her two packs of Midori Letterpress paper, plus pale green envelopes. I think I’m onto something – and I want to keep it going. I’m sorry about the cost of stamps, but hooray for letters.
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