Riots

I'm sure by now many readers will have seen the appalling riots that took place a few days ago in my home town, London, and elsewhere in England. The authorities are dealing with the problem; Parliament even sat today in a rare emergency session (during the Summer Recess, no less) to discuss the matter. Residents in the affected parts of town have responded by cleaning up their communities.

The violence is confined to the cities; the small town where I live is completely safe. Watching the live television coverage of the looting, it was clear that only certain stores were being targeted for robbery. I looked in vain to see if any stationers had been raided. Consumer electronics, branded sportswear and training shoes, jewelry and alcohol were obviously high on the wish-lists of the looters, but not stationery. There were no people filmed with arm-fulls of lever-arch files or pockets stuffed with Staedtlers. Palimpsest, living closer to the action, confirmed as much with this post about a local branch of Ryman which was unscathed.

As she says, "a riot is a complex beast" and I'll not offer any explanations about it here. It now emerges, though, as the first defendants appear before the courts, that many of those arrested and charged for alleged crimes were not feckless youths but in fact people who should have known better, such as a teaching assistant, university graduates and even a graphic designer: the kind of people for whom stationery might have been an attractive target.

Stationery Archeology 3

Third in this series, I'm really excited by this find. It is a Staedtler Shorthand pencil, HB and made in Great Britain. I found this on 22 October 2010 in a stationer's in Southampton. It is salmon-pink with a white band and a red painted end-cap, and the lettering (stamped in red) says:

GREAT BRITAIN STAEDTLER SHORTHAND JET BONDED


I love the stylised typography of the words "Staedtler" and "Jet Bonded". The model number is obscured by the price label - but I think this was model number 114. This pencil is a bit scuffed from years languishing unloved and unwanted in the stationer's pencil rack, but I'd like to think that has now ended and it has found a welcome in my modest collection. I've not tried writing with this pencil, so don't ask yet how well it writes.

I did not even know that Staedtler made stenographers' pencils here in the UK, so this was a delightful surprise for me. This clearly is one of the predecessors of the rare-as-hens'-teeth Stenofix. As it happened, I found this just around the corner from where I used to work, and shared an office with a shorthand typist called Joan. That office is now a hairdresser's.

This pencil was a bargain, as it cost me only 50p! I feel like I've just unearthed Sutton Hoo. What a shame they only had one in the rack, as I'd have had the lot. Never mind, I also found a somewhat beaten-up made-in-GB Staedtler tradition 2H too.