Maruman Mnemosyne

After a long time of waiting for this shipment to arrive, we finally have our newest paper line on the shelves: Maruman Mnemosyne notebooks and pads. We've had a few customers bring up this brand to us every now and then, and I remember when I first looked into Maruman back at 906 Dundas West, we were too small for such a large shipment from Japan. It's both wonderful and a little daunting to see how far we've come. I will also say there was a fair bit of confusion as our shipment was floating out at sea for months, so perhaps not as far as I think, although previously our shipments used to be lost in the sea of customs and UPS. We're carrying a few different sizes and rulings - A4 pads in landscape in particular are a bit hard to find in North America, but we're also carrying standard sizes like A5 notebooks. The mini notebooks are also great because they have perforated pages - you can easily tear them out to leave notes for other people or yourself. There's also an A6 open-dated agenda, called Today's Act. Along with a spot for the date at the top, it has two columns of check boxes on the side, which would be perfect for to-do lists, especially more complicated ones where there could be multiple check offs to tasks. Also perforated, so good for delegating :) We've heard lots of good things about Maruman, and I love the small details - 7mm line ruling, a well-designed space for a date and title at the top, subtle grey lines with a bolder one breaking up the page into sections for organization or projects. My favourite size of notebook and also correspondence paper is (I think) B5 - although I'm using an A5 for my journaling and a B6 Slim for my daily notes, as those are both a bit more portable, or A4 for longer letters, so really I guess I like them all. In any case, the B5 is a good balance between the larger A4 and the medium A5, so you have more space without it becoming cumbersome. It's the notebook for the writing sample below, but the paper is the same in all of the notebooks. It's often hard to beat the quality of Japanese stationery, and Maruman notebooks are no exception: they take fountain pen ink extremely well on their smooth paper, with little to no feather or bleeding even with wet pens. The ink is J. Herbin's Cacao du Bresil, one of my favourite understated grey-browns.

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In other news, things are going well here. We spent a quiet weekend in the city after one crazy trip to IKEA. I think it's my secret dream to be important enough to have IKEA shut down so I can shop there in peace, like the president or something, but I guess it's all part of the adventure of home assembly furniture and meatballs. Caleb always falls asleep in the car on the way home, so I suppose it's a good way to tire him out as well. He's beginning to really freak me out with his growing up. The other day, after the shop was closed, the phone rang, and he ran to the warehouse, climbed up on the table and took it off its port. I had assumed he wouldn't make it to the phone in time before the answering machine picked up, but in the moment, it could've gone either way as he pressed some buttons and started talking into it: "We're closed, sorry, it's okay bye." I'm glad to say that he didn't make it to the phone before the machine picked up, although it's just a matter of time now. It's interesting all of the things he picks up on just listening to our phone conversations - ordering pizzas for papa (!), repeating back what I can only imagine are imaginary credit card numbers, talking about fountain pens, or telling Super to stop barking. Before I know it, he's going to be ordering pizzas with papa's real credit card number and giving instructions on how to go down our laneway.