Getting to Know...Scribble Monboddo (Again)
What’s behind your concept? Well, Mummy and Daddy loved each other very much and, oh I see, not that. Erm, I realised I was building up something of a surfeit of nibbage and probably ought to do something constructive with all the scriptorial splendour I had at my disposal. The obvious thing, I thought, was to review stationery items using the products themselves – but it wasn’t obvious enough for anyone to have started a blog based purely on that idea, it seemed, and thus Too Many Pens was born. Too Many Pencils, Too Many Papers, Too Many Purples and Too Many Peacocks followed suit, embracing a love of all things stationery and a passing fondness for pavo cristatus. The rest, as they say, is geography. Or was it history? Bloomin’ humanities!
Who are your books for? People who want to improve their team’s creativity. But that’s another story.
Do you take notes? Frenetically. Also, with gratuitous curlicues. Why not?
What’s next for you? A new job, sorting out the interface between humans and computers. I will be taking plenty of notebooks.
Describe yourself in three objects Purple Top Hat (see helpful illustration), Alt-Bergs, OS Map
Notebook, Notes App or both? What is this devilry you speak of? A notebook, of course!
What’s in your pencil case right now?
Pencils – wood-cased ones, as it happens. There are a few pen-cases too, though, like my Nock Brasstown which, naturally, is chock-full of brass.
Pencil, ballpoint, gel, or fountain pen? A fountain pen for writing, a pencil for drawing. Gel pens are unsuitable for either, in my less than entirely humble opinion, and ballpoints are of course the very spawn of Beelzebub.
Which three famous people, (living or dead) would you like to have dinner with? Lord Monboddo himself (obvs), Mrs Beeton (for her management solutions), and my other half, who technically isn’t famous yet but will be one day and I wouldn’t enjoy the conversation with the other two guests half as much without our usual double act.
What’s the best thing about the place you live? It has a silly name which makes grown men giggle, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and there are no street lights so I can make friends with bats in the summer and owls in the winter. Oh, and it's got a few fountain pens... in every room.
What’s your most treasured possession? A copy of Peter Rabbit, rendered in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Where are some of your favourite Stationery spots on the Internet? Nero’s Notes is one of them, naturally, but I can’t really pass up the opportunity to plug United Inkdom and its multi-perspective meta-reviews. I and a few like-minded souls created it because we wanted to read something like that, and it’s nice to know it serves a need. I’ve met some lovely people from the stationery world in real life as a result, too!
