Cecilia found this amazing story on CNN about the so-called “Post-it wars”:
The first shot was fired four months ago, when employees at French computer gaming company Ubisoft… put up a Post-it note image from the 1980s classic “Space Invaders” on the window.
The bank BNP (Paribas), across the street, then fired back with a Post-it Pac-Man. Since then, Post-it images have been cropping up all over the city; you can see some of the other images at this website.
I just got a new pen — a Faber-Castell E-Motion that’s the happy consequence of needing to use some frequent flyer miles before they expired. I’ve inked it up with Cacao du Bresil and have been writing with it all morning.
Pictures and thoughts will follow once I put it to more use than just scribbling, but in the meantime, first impressions have me wondering about desk pens and pocket pens. With its chrome cap, this thing weighs nearly 2 ounces, as opposed to the quarter ounce of the Pilot rollerballs I prefer when I need to write on cheap paper. My other fountain pens are nowhere near that heavy, either, I guess because they’re mostly entry-level plastic models. (Even my steel-capped Pelikano is light!)
At any rate, the E-Motion is obviously going to be a pen that takes its position on my desk and doesn’t move much from room to room. It’s exactly the sort of fountain pen I never thought I’d want — the sort of pen that a younger, snider me would have called unnecessary and officious. Of course, now that it’s come into my possession, I’m far from unhappy to have it.
I recently did a major clean-out of old files, clippings and media mentions. One article dropped on the floor on the way to the trash bin, and I picked it up for a last look. It was dated December 29, 1999 and was titled, “Will New Electronic Planners Overtake the Paper Calendar We all Know and Love?” 
“Yes, as the millennium draws to a close,” the article gravely intoned, “the calendar world seems headed for a great divide: On the one side stand the doodlers, the note-takers, the defenders of the paper-based system–wall calendars, desk calendars, pocket calendars/organizers–anything to write on or add sticky notes to. On the other are those who aren’t afraid of a little PDA, a Personal Digital Assistant (PalmPilots and the like), and what’s known as “Internet-based calendaring”–the countless calendars/planners offered in Microsoft Outlook, or on Web sites such as Yahoo, Netscape and Visto. Given the usual fate of old-fashioned industries whose markets are invaded by hipper technology, one might expect pen-and-paper calendars to be swiftly blown away by the products of the information age..”
What is funny is that the “leaders in the world of PDAs” the article mentions–Palm Computing, Handspring, Hewlett Packard and Casio–have disappeared or barely rate a mention today as providing calendar products. Handspring, the originator of PalmPilots, went defunct in 2003. Palm, Inc. was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2010, which retired the Palm brand.
12 years later – the two paper calendar companies noted in the article – Filofax and At-A-Glance – are still quite in evidence; as are all the planner/organizer makers from that period: Franklin Covey, Day Runner, Letts of London, Charing Cross, Per Annum, Exacompta, Quo Vadis, Blueline, etc.
Could we have predicted this?
Is it is simple as the statement by one store manager, “people still like to see their own handwriting.” Or is it, as a vice president of The At-A-Glance Group posits, “most people find it easier to retain things if they write it down.”
While I was sick last month, I started making my way through the Sherlock Holmes mysteries I so loved as a child. Of course, now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to put them down. And I was amused to read the following in The Hound of the Baskervilles:
If you examine it carefully you will see that both the pen and the ink have given the writer trouble. The pen has spluttered twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle. Now, a private pen or ink-bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare. But you know the hotel ink and the hotel pen, where it is rare to get anything else.
I daresay I’ve never been to a hotel that had fountain pens on hand, let alone a dip pen. But judging from the cheapo Bics they all seem to offer, I’d say very little has changed in the abstract.
Aside from a picture in USA Today (the 4th one in this slideshow), this story doesn’t seem to have made the news in the US, but Cecilia read it in a French paper and we both thought it was worth sharing here.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Swiss arm of the World Wildlife Fund set up 1,600 paper mache pandas in Geneva, to represent the number of pandas left living in the wild. The statistic is very depressing, but I can’t think of a livelier way to draw attention to the cause.
It’s always fun to check our Flickr page to see what our friends and fans are up to… most recently, we’ve got some lovely motorcycle drawings by picturesofmaya, and some ever-fabulous calligraphy and sketches by Gentian.
Thanks again, guys — very inspiring!
Thanks to all who entered our foreign-language planner giveaway; it was fun to see how many of you speak (or are learning) another language! Here are our illustrious winners:
If your name is on this list, check your email — I’ve sent you a message. If you’re not, check the blog later in the fall, when we’ll be giving away some other foreign-language planners (including Russian and Hungarian).
I haven’t seen any new reviews of Quo Vadis products lately, but there’ve been some nice posts about products from our sister company, Exacompta, that I figure are worth sharing:
If you’ve written or read a review of an Exaclair product, please send it along — we’d love to read it!
It’s a bit late in the year in North America to be talking about beaches, but my post last week about coffee shops turned up a wonderfully salty name in the comments, and I had to share: BeBeached. Located on the harbor in Margate, Kent, BeBeached offers food, coffee, and views of the Old Town across the bay.
You can learn more about BeBeached on this website; Col was also kind enough to send pictures. According to his email, BeBeached “is the first building on the breakwater after the red telephone box”:
We’re proud to have international fans, but we’re also glad to have globally minded followers here at home. That’s why we figured we’d do a foreign-language planner giveaway, so you don’t have to travel abroad to practice your dates and declensions. Here are the editions we’ve got:
Note that I haven’t seen these editions in the flesh; the photo above was taken by our product manager, Cecilia. So while I assume that the European Business planner is a lot like our own, I’m really not sure. Prestige seems to have ivory paper, judging from the French website, while the other editions have white.
Ordinarily, we lump all our contestants together and try our best to accommodate winners’ preferences. This time, since people may only be interested in a specific language, I’ll ask everyone to specify what planner you want when you comment, and run each drawing separately.
So: to enter, leave a comment on this post before Thursday, September 15 at midnight EST, and be sure you let us know what language you’d like.
One last note… I know we have international readers on this blog, but since the point of the drawing is to hook people up with a product they can’t find in their home countries, please don’t ask for a language that’s native to where you live! If you’re in the UK and you want a Spanish planner, or you’re in Latin America and you want the Dutch edition, you are more than welcome to enter.
Good luck!
