I have a real weakness for stationery, notebooks, and basically anything you write or draw on or in. I love hotel stationery. And old company stationery. I still have letterhead from my stints at both Time and Life magazines. I still have my Spy stationery. Don’t even get me started on airmail envelopes.
At Vanity Fair, I upped my addiction with stationery from Benneton Graveur in Paris. The shop itself, on Boulevard Malesherbes, is a stationery dreamworld of polished wood walls and thick leather books filled with paper samples and old type faces. For casual note-taking, I use a blue legal-size pad called a “counsels notebook” that I had seen one of our English solicitors use when I was at Vanity Fair. They are lined and have a perforation to tear the pages out when you’re done with them.
Another of my big splurges on the stationery front are Pina Zangaro screwpost binders. I bought my first ones at A.I. Friedman, the old art-supply store on 18th Street. I love the way they look. And I like their heft. The covers are made of the same material that clipboards are. And the hinges are made of metal. I think the binders were designed for presentations. They take three-hole, 8.5-by-11 copier paper, and I use mine for my daily and weekly to-do lists for Air Mail — our international digital weekly. I keep another for story ideas and issue lineups.
There is something both cathartic and energizing about unscrewing by hand the three metal posts that hold the paper in, replacing the old lists with newly printed ones, and then screwing the whole thing back together. I repeat it every morning. This is in lieu of going to the gym.
More Pina Zangaro binders
Carter’s favorite binder, but with a horizontal landscape design.
Here’s a slightly larger version of his favorite binder. It also comes in the landscape design, for the same price.
And an even larger version, in the landscape design.
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