Rad and Hungry
There are a peculiarly large number of stationery subscription boxes out there. Most of them seem like something a suburban grandma in North Carolina might think is nice, but not a lot have tempted me. Until I landed on Rad and Hungry.
One of my favourite things about RAH is that they lean particularly hard into the vintage school notebooks, which I love. As with my stack of Russian exercise books, I love the simplicity and versatility of these little things.
My first delivery from RAH was actually a pack of previous editions of their STMT subscription boxes, and I recently got the first of my own subscription.
Each edition RAH focuses on vintage stationery goods from a specific country.
Sometimes there are non-vintage or oddball goodies in the package, but generally it’s a couple notebooks and a writing instrument of some sort, as well as a screen-printed logo design, postage stamp and newsletter telling the story behind the trip and the sourcing story of the items included.
My first one was the Chile edition, which included a small top-bound spiral memo pad, a custom-pressed A5 staple-bound book, and a (very hard) Chilean vintage pencil.
In a world where those of us who love to boil the oceans with our travel habit cannot do so, this and the prior editions I also received was a nice reminder of the world that exists outside my borders.
Most of all, this stuff has inspired me to want to travel again when this whole crazy pandemic world comes to an end. I do hope to be able to travel like we could before, and now I will be hunting stationery as I wander in addition to the books, magazines and records that are my usual souvenirs.
Something I noticed between this haul and the Russian notebooks is the common thread of these all being called something like “quad”. For example, the Russian ones I got on my own are called tetradi, the Bulgarian ones are tetradka, the Portuguese caderno, the Italian and Panamanian ones quaderno, the Uruguayan ones both quarani and cuaderno, in Sweden and various other places they call it a block, and of course the French word we use here in Québec is cahier (similar to “carré” or “square”).
All of these references to “four” or “square” made me look up the etymology in my French dictionary, and behold, “cahier” comes from the latin “quadernum” - an assemblage of four sheets. I assume this is based on the fact that most notebooks are sheets of paper bound in their centre and then folded to make four total writing surfaces from each sheet. Thank you Rad and Hungry for keeping my linguistic chops sharp!
