my name is mark and I use stationery.

Finally! A new stationery review! I recently had the means to finally acquire a Surrokko fountain pen - what appears to be the only aluminum-body, non-lathe-turned New Zealand-made fountain pen ever. At least, the maker has lots of claims to this and I choose to believe their marketing terms “Crafted in New Zealand", though they are quite cagey about manufacturing details. They have a few (monetized, oddly) YouTube marketing videos as well, which posit that the pen is “Made in New Zealand”, as well as featuring themes like extreme sports, individualism, military toxic masculinity and Viking armies, and conventionally attractive white people (one video has a split-second clip of Maori dancers).

The vanity-press project by Mark Christopher Kratt (J0K 3K0)

I really wanted a cool and easy way to collect Canada Post cancellations, as a way to collect the pictorial cancellations offered, and also as a way to document my domestic travel. Alas, no one seemed to offer or have otherwise thought of one, so I created it.

Vintage Canadian pencils are what got me started on this journey, but they are devilishly hard to find. My sources vary from ebay to Etsy to Kijiji, with yard sales and thrift stores a potential source one day when we are not trapped at home and afraid of anything touched by human hands.

Montréal has been on a tear opening new shops that include a focus on general home goods with a healthy dose of stationery and paper goods. Much of the selection of the latter includes bespoke designs made by global producers but a few local makers have come along for the ride, some of which I’ve reviewed before. I’ve also reviewed a few of Montréal’s more specialized stationery shops in the past, but along with the aforementioned shops I’ve decided to pull together in this post all the places in Montréal where one can find fun stationery stuff.

I was very excited to recently get a large package of goodies from Endless Stationery. Their package included mostly leather goods (a selection of pen and notebook cases) some notebooks featuring “Regalia Paper” (which appears to be their in-house brand), and my first retractable fountain pen.

Based on the popular and typical “ergonomic” modifications to pencils and pens, I strongly believe that I hold mine very differently than most other writers. Whilst my righty privilege is fully understood, my grip seems to be tighter and more square in shape than the assumed position for which most pens and pencils are constructed.

I made my first buy from CW Pencils, which is one of the few online shops where I can get Musgrave pencils from the US. The Tennessee Reds wood box and pencils inside both have a strong cedar fragrance, and don’t write too bad. The Harvest Professionals are indeed nicer than your average HB, and I really enjoy the feel and weight of the round 600 News line.

Calepino makes possibly the best notebooks I know of. I love their true A5 brightly-coloured threadbound books with a nice chipboard cover and an inner cover page.

Only recently did my accumulation of quality pens grow great enough that some sort of storage and organization method other than keeping them all in their original cases or boxes become necessary. Mind you, I do still have a few pens that I regularly use whose value and quality don’t warrant much consideration of storage or protection, but the number that do is increasing, and so I was very happy to obtain the Leather Zippered 20-Pen Case from Galen Leather.

A recent visit to Pen Chalet resulted in obtaining an Aurora Style pen, in a lovely muted blue. I loved the simple design and rose-gold accents.

Because what I need more than anything else in the world is more fountain pen ink, I managed to obtain the beloved Diamine Inkvent calendar.

I recently gave props to the Benu Briolette, probably the best pen I’ve ever written with. But sometimes we also have to talk about bad pen experiences. Such was mine with the Montverde Ritma, a pen that, whilst at about half the price of the Briolette, is still not a cheap pen, and which Montverde markets as quite a high-end writing experience.

I have been admiring the designs of Benu for a while, and watching with interest their recent move from Moscow to Armenia. Quite an understandable decision as a company that is very dependent upon a global export market. Whilst the Russian market is large, I doubt it could currently replace the global high-end sales benu had enjoyed prior to wartime sanctions.

I’m a systems kind of guy. I find it hard to really get into something if I don’t have a system to properly do the enjoying. Most of my systems are essentially “use it up in a structured way.” And most follow a general pattern of saving the best for last. This has the unintended consequence of leaving me to always feel like I’m using the less-than-ideal things in my collection - whether it be my collection of pencils, papers, inks, bath soaps or refrigerator leftovers. I would love to write a letter on the beautiful new Rhodia pad I just bought, but first I have to make it through this 2000 pages of crap I salvaged from Hilroy notebooks.

One of the stationery subscriptions I’m currently enjoying is from Stickii, a monthly sticker club with the unique feature of dispatching their sticker selections in an A5 6-ring binder storage page. It’s been a really fun way to start storing and organizing the stickers I already had, and each month another page arrives in the mail, already-full, and no matter how hard I seem to try using them, I still seem to refill these pages faster than they go empty.

Gravitas is an Irish-based company essentially run by Ben Walsh. Originator of a concrete pen, most of his current offerings are aluminum with various patinas, electroplating, anodizing and enamels, giving some interesting and original colour ways.

During my papeterie shopping spree a couple months back, I grabbed this 3-pack of notebooks from Rifle Paper Co. The artwork and design was excellent, but I ran into some problems when testing them for fountain pen use.

My new favourite pen is this lovely German-made Diplomat Magnum, recently ordered from Goulet. This pen has it all: writes smoothly, never making me fear of torn paper, even papers that aren’t fountain-pen friendly; a wet tip that flows consistently with no need to adjust or prime even after many days unused; a light and easy feel in the hand and a slim and small nib.

I made a recent visit to Nota Bene, Montréal’s glorious and very comprehensive stationery shop. I was on a bit of a mission to find some fountain pen friendly index cards, as well as some more of my stationery staples. I was quite pleased by some of the things I found.

A mini post just to show the beautiful sticker sheets from Artpetry, a Ukrainian artist who has incorporated the traumatic imagery of life in wartime to be creative and bring a little beauty to even the worst of the world.

On my recent Montréal shopping spree, I grabbed a lovely notebook from Lili Graffiti, with an illustrated cover showing an iconic Montréal street scene. It was in a mylar sleeve and I did not try to take it out, seeing the description that it was “lined” paper. Despite being staple-bound, I have been trying to overlook this recently as my new favourite notebooks are Goulet Pens’s staple-bound notebooks with lined 68gsm Tomoe River paper.

Four Bears Sticker Club is another resource for fun adhesives, and in the tradition of Pipsticks and Violet, I have sought to use some of the goodies they offer.

I recently went on a bit of an online shopping spree with Journalsay, which from the evidence I’ve found is a distribution partner for Jianwu stationery. The online shop includes numerous other brands, and specializes in decorative sticker products.

Someone recently recommended Franklin-Christoph to me, indicating they made their products in the US and had unveiled a new line of fountain pen paper made from sugar cane fibre, something I’ve been increasingly aware is a great fountain pen medium. This has been sold under other brands, along with papers made from bamboo, straw fibre and corn husk fibre, all of which boast much better fountain pen qualities than typical wood fibre paper, possibly because they’re annual “green” fibres - types of grasses rather than wood from perennial trees.

I’ve enjoyed buying a LOT of stuff from JetPens lately. They became my first go-to for all the variety they stock, and especially since I started playing more with gel and fountain pens, and since CultPens’s website started giving me weird errors and essentially being unusable on all browsers. But my enthusiasm waned after a couple very long waits for shipments, unexpected costs and slight disappointments with some pen sets.

Cretacolor is an oddball brand. Pencil manufacturing these days requires significant scale to serve the discount market, but Cretacolor essentially does this by simply monopolizing their small national market in Austria. They do have a global reach, with a fairly well-known position in the art supply space, and their web site shares this narrow focus. But their line of pencil products is significantly wider than this would lead us to believe.