A day well spent at Greytown’s charming Stationery Festival

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In Greytown, Victoria Moss finds new friends at a festival dedicated to the love of stationery and the cultural analogue comeback Whenever someone asks to borrow my pen, I grip it…

A visitor tries out a vintage Olympia typewriter at the New Zealand Stationery Festival. Photo / New Zealand Stationery Festival

In Greytown, Victoria Moss finds new friends at a festival dedicated to the love of stationery and the cultural analogue comeback.

Whenever someone asks to borrow my pen, I grip it tighter and reach into my zip-up pencil case for a ballpoint

I don’t mind if they forget to return a disposable pen made from garish plastic and covered in advertising, but there’s no way I’m lending anyone my solid brass fountain pen that was made in Germany by a manufacturer that’s been operating since 1883 (with a break during World War II).

My interest in stationery began when I was learning to write, and my Dad would let me use his ink pen to practise the perfect “double story a” (that’s an “a” character that has an arch across the top). I’ve preferred a heavy, inky pen ever since.

I always thought I was the only person with this level of appreciation for a really great pen.

But the relatively recent discovery that others shared my interest led me to tumble down a stationery rabbit hole.

I found online videos critiquing whiteboard markers, and a global community of people who obsess over limited-release fountain pens and ink in handmade glass bottles, collect hundreds of rolls of washi (that’s decorative paper sticky tape for the uninitiated) and write in detail about the experience of crafting their own leather journal cover and embellishing it to their own taste.

I had found my people. And then I heard about the New Zealand Stationery Festival.

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