Stationery

Ahh, whiling away another quiet weekend. We saw Breach last night (good, aside from some uninspired acting from tumor-head boy); I got measured for my wedding dress this morning; we did some shopping. Ended up in the Borders stationery section at Redmond Town Center.

My god, what a stationery section!!

I am quite partial to paper products, but my other stores never had a section like this. I could get lost in there. The one thing I fail to understand is why Borders continues to stock so many awful Paperchase products. Their designs are fairly juvenile, and the quality of their journals is very poor, especially the bound journals. They use cheap paper, and the binding on the last Paperchase book I bought fell into several pieces before I was even done filling it. And these are books that are supposed to hold your memories for a lifetime??

No sir, get me Paperblanks any day (Borders also stocks these). Their products are gorgeous. Their design is inspired, functional, their materials feel great to the touch (thick paper, silky covers...). And their bindings are great—durable, and they lay flat on every page (a quality which one often fails to consider when purchasing a journal). As far as I'm concerned, they're the Rolls Royce of journals. And they're in the exact same price range as Paperchase. So why stock crap when you can have art??

I must admit that the store we were in today had a lot of other Paperchase products that I hadn't seen before, which looked okay... Their spiral-bound journals, for example, avoid the problem of bindings (though their paper is still cheap); and they had a lot of cool-looking note cards and photo albums and such. And I guess there's no harm in having too many choices rather than not enough. But still, who would want a Hello Kitty rip-off when they could have Tiffany stained glass? Or pink butterflies (didn't I have pyjamas in this pattern when I was 6?), when they could have Chinese paintings w/ hand-stitched bindings, mother-of-pearl inlays, or 14th century jali (stone lattice window) artwork? The mind boggles.