Taiwan Stationery Fair 2024

This weekend is the Taiwan International Stationery Fair, which took place at the Taipei World Trade Center, and it was our first time attending. If you’re planning on coming to Taipei and you’re interested in stationery, it’s worth attending, but if we classify stationery into three categories

1. fountain pens and inks

2. school supplies and office supplies

3. creative journaling supplies (washi and PET tapes, wooden stamps)

At this stationery fair I think it’s mostly just categories 2 and 3. Of course there is always some overlap between all three categories and I did see one vendor with used fountain pens and Juspirit, a local Taiwanese fountain pen and ink store, was there with a selection of fountain pen inks. We went on Friday morning, the first day of the show, and it was already busy.

It’s inexpensive to enter, I think around or less than $5 CAD, but we were lucky enough to receive free tickets from Juspirit.

The show was huge. It is a massive exhibition hall, and a large portion of the show was made up of big corporations and manufacturers that sell worldwide or in Asia. As a stationery shop we’ve seen many of these vendors before, and they also exhibit of course in the major Japan stationery expos.

There were lots of scissors to test out, gel pens, little snaps and clips, staplers, markers, children’s books, technology, glue sticks, board games.

But another huge other portion of it was independent, creative artists, mostly from Taiwan, selling all sorts of things from washi and PET tapes, sticker sheets, tote bags, vinyl stickers, rubber stamps, cell phone and AirPod cases, keychains, pouches.

Here’s an example of a creator booth, of which there were…a lot. It was difficult to take pictures of the independent artists and creators because it was crowded and the booths were quite close together.

We did indeed bring the stroller, and I alternated kids with Jon. Here is a glamour shot of Jon and Caleb, along the wall with a row of other stationery husbands.

And how much fun it is to have a few treasures to bring home after all that wandering!

I spent most of my time ogling at everything, and testing out my terrible Mandarin on the few vendors who didn’t speak English and therefore did not immediately switch into English. I ended up with a couple of postcards, PET tapes and a fun hand-carved rubber stamp. The postcards are music themed to send home to the kids’ music teachers. We may not be practising instruments over the summer, but at least we are thinking about how we are not practising instruments.

Everyone else got noodles.

Actually I forgot that the kids actually also got these two stamps, right at the beginning. There were not nearly as many rubber stamps as I thought there would be (both at the show and in the stationery shops here in Taipei—still exploring, though), but there was one smaller booth actually in the large corporation area, near the entrance, that had a bunch of wooden stamps. These ones were surprisingly expensive, if I recall correctly (a good chance no), but of course I cannot resist a stationery souvenir for the kids.