Editor's Letters

How lucky are we to be entering a summer marking the fifth annual Stationery Store Day (SSD)? After all, reaching five is a milestone. At that age, children enter kindergarten — literally, “the garden of knowledge.” There are five senses, five workdays per week, five players on a basketball team, five rings on the Olympic logo — and of course five fingers per hand and five toes per foot.

Thus it’s fair to say that SSD has officially arrived, now an official calendar fixture alongside the equally hip Record Store Day. And we owe it all to Kristina Burkey of Calliope Paperie. Watching stationery shops struggle during lockdown, Burkey — who admits she “always goes big right out of the gate” — recalls telling her husband she wanted to have this special day, with limited merchandise made by different artists.

As Burkey began pondering the necessity for a whole separate ecommerce site — and every other conceivable detail as it came to mind — her husband suggested she start by establishing the day and going from there. “LOL, he’s always pulling me back down,” Burkey told me. “But that is what I did! I established the day and had a couple merch items for the first year, and every year since it’s just gotten bigger and bigger. And the shops come up with their own activities and specials and they just go wild with it!”

While Burkey painstakingly generates all the merch — this year’s is shown above from Karen Schipper, who is also new to the Biely & Shoaf artist roster — each shop determines its festivities. “A lot of shop-dense cities have Paper Shop Crawls (which I call Paper Trails) and in Massachusetts, Tiny Turns Paperie wants to do ours with a little zine to make it extra fun. For Calliope I’m planning live screenprinting plus other surprises you’ll just have to wait for!”

I’ve got a longer interview with Burkey on The Paper Nerd covering the evolution of this most important day of stationery celebration — but for now, peruse this issue to stock those SSD shelves!

Until next issue,