All Tomorrow’s Pencils
Home from tour, counting my blessings and my writing utensils
On our way home from Dublin now. I’m deflated in a typical end-of-tour way, even while feeling grateful for the music and our experiences, and excited to touch American soil. To see my new home! Casey moved us into a new place right after I left town. She is a hero and a saint. Yet again, everyone please clap for Casey (and her handy parents)!
Tourmate Anna St. Louis (whose songs and voice are so lovely! real name, btw) made a super sweet documentary of our time in Europe. When she bought a twenty-year-old video camera somewhere in Austria early in the run and started filming every day, the rest of us assumed she was collecting material for future social media promotion, the cross every artist is forced to bear these days. Then, after the last show, she gathered us in the green room to unveil her creation: a five-minute doc soundtracked by Natasha Bedingfield and The Faces, warming our hearts to atomic temperatures.
Apart from the music we played, for me, this was a tour of stationery stores. Since landing on the shores of the Great Old World three and a half weeks ago, I visited ten pen/pencil/paper shops. You could say that whence my great-grandma fled so she wouldn’t be killed by Cossacks, I returned so I could ogle mechanical pencils, imported erasers, and new-old-stock office supplies. It’s a frivolous victory but it’s our victory.
I visited a new store every other day. I didn’t always buy something, but it brought me to another part of town. It felt silly setting my bearings for “stationery” in Google Maps when I could have gone to the literal Louvre and other sites, but along the way I’d pass the city’s river, take photos of scrunkly local dogs—for example, a French bulldog wearing one of those striped French mime-sailor outfits, accompanied by an older Frenchmen wearing a matching outfit and tuque—cut through parks and maybe sit in a coffee shop. Then the prize: a shelf of €2 pencils.
I’m not sure how much “normal” people care about writing utensils. Maybe not enough to justify three mini-reviews of shops around Europe. But we’re here… Why not.
Fred Aldous in Manchester
A recommendation from band friend and merch manager Jess. Multiple floors, full of every art supply you could want or need, with a much friendlier presentation than any Blick or big box home goods store. Their first-floor inventory verges on the overly cutesy, gift shop-y, and cheap, but it’s compensated by the other floors of more serious tools and by the place’s overall fun brightness.
What I bought: a Korean mechanical pencil with an orange barrel, some stickers for Casey
Present & Correct in London
This small shop is more of an office supply packaging museum than a store. The display is painfully present and correct. The shelves are filled with impractical notebooks, overly designed planners, and expensive scissors. But it’s worth visiting for the aforementioned museum-quality product packaging, much of which is vintage new-old-stock. I can’t overstate how cool and beautiful some of the old Italian, Japanese, and Soviet products they stock are. A real case of “they don’t make ’em the way they used to.”
That reminds me: growing up, one of my favorite things to do was to explore the concrete cellar in my zaid’s house to look for old legal pads, boxes of pens, and envelopes, inventory left over from the department stores he ran in the 60s and 70s and from his burglar alarm business. Like finding treasures—in bulk.
What I bought: nothing
Draw! Art Store in Glasgow
This one. The best one. Maybe the best I’ve ever visited. Run by a former teacher, Neil, and his dog, Marcie. They occupy a nook on the second floor of a shop “arcade” on a quiet street in Glasgow. The whole store is maybe only 200 square feet, but Neil jammed it with a more interesting and practical inventory than some shops ten times its size. Traveler’s Company refills, Ohto pens and pencils, lots of high-quality fountain pen stuff I don’t understand, and best of all: vintage American pencils. Specimens from estate sales and eBay. Priced by the each. Arranged to display all their beautiful mid-century script engraved glory. I bought four.
Neil asked what brought me to town. I told him I’m a drummer, and he said it’s a curious thing, a lot of drummers come in to the shop. Drummers for bands I had heard of. I asked if he had any ideas why drummers visit. He said maybe because we’re in the back of the stage, we’re the private writing and cartooning type. Haha.
(Funnily, the manager at Vicar Street, the venue in Dublin, said the opposite. She said, “You don’t seem like a drummer.” I asked why. She said “because drummers are loud and gregarious—you’re very quiet and polite!”)
How did he come to run a pen-pencil-paper store? He worked in education, then for some sort of agency, then he got tired of the bullshit. Had to be his own boss again. Opened Draw! Six years strong!
If you’re ever in Glasgow, if you like drawing and writing trinkets, I highly recommend Draw! Give Marcie a pet, buy a pencil.
What I bought: Tombow 8900 pencil (new), Blackwing 17 pencil (new), Traveler’s Company brass pencil (new), Eberhard Faber Ebony Jet Black Extra Smooth 6325 (vintage), Eberhard Faber Weatherproof 6649 (vintage), General’s Carbo-Weld Scribe 375 (vintage), Eagle Practice 283 (vintage)
Thanks to everyone who came to see us play in Europe. And thank you for following along here. I hope you’re safe from blistering weather, enjoying the season.
—Spoon
Remembering one of the only real complaints I ever heard from your teachers growing up, I’d say “drummers” love writing utensils because pencils double as tappity tap tap tapping drum mallets and pens can clicky click click like maracas. In fact they’re probably the first “drum sticks” a future drummer ever holds. Which comes first? The drummer or the innocent child with a maddening urge to tap out a paradiddle with a pencil on a trapper keeper?
Fun! When I’m traveling in foreign lands I visit yarn shops. I love the getting there as much as the being there.