Did you know today is World Stationery Day?
We are so used to our mobile phones, laptop computers and tablets in our everyday lives that it slowly replaces our stationeries. I know that I prefer to have electronic copies of notes, documents and PowerPoint slides for school because I don’t want to carry all the paper and adding weight to my backpack. I make myself organized and keep everything on an external hard drive, which are located in folders that I can search and retrieve easily. There is an ongoing trend to go paperless, even with receipts and banking statements. But does that mean we should totally get rid of old-fashioned stationeries? I doubt that, because some of the more important documentations which require ink signatures would have to be printed out and signed. Artists depend on these things for their creation. There are still many areas in life that need stationeries, one of which is in an office setting with office supplies.
@Ekaterina Bolovtsova / Pexels
Stationeries include, but not limited to, pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, erasers, markers, highlighters, crayons, pencil crayons, felt pens, staplers, hole puncher, rulers, scissors, glue and post-it notes.
I used to love to go shopping with my mom every year during the back-to-school season and pick up very cheap stationery. It was a time where the whole store would be filled with isles of stationeries. Children and their parents holding a list given by the school for them to buy the required materials. But that resulted in me having way too much excess of notebooks and pens that I don’t think I’ll finish using in the next decade.
@Kterina Holmes / Pexels
Every year on the last Wednesday of April, it is “World Stationery Day”. This year it happens to fall on Wednesday, April 26th. During this day, people will try to be intentional in doing things the traditional way, for example writing out a note for someone or using a pen to write out a to-do list.
The word “stationery” comes from the Latin word “stationarius” which translates to “unmoved” or “permanent”. It makes sense that we use pens to write something on paper and it is permanent on there, or writing on something with a permanent marker, hopefully not the white board.
@Frans van Heerden / Pexels
Interesting facts about stationery:
- Post-it notes actually came from an accident by a scientist that invented a very weak type of glue
- Paper was invented in 121 A.D. by a man called Cai Lun from the Eastern Han dynasty in China
- Quill pens were invented in the 6th Century by someone in Spain
- An average pencil can draw a line for more than 56 kilometres
When was the last time that you used a pencil?