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The second annual Stationery Store Day will take place across the world on Aug. 5 this year, announced Kristina Burkey, owner of Calliope, a Massachusetts-based stationery shop.

“I get asked regularly, ‘Where are the stationery stores in my area?’ or ‘I’m going here for vacation, are there any stationery shops?’ and I thought there should be a comprehensive list somewhere for people to go to and see where their closest paper shops are,” Burkey said. “Then I thought, well, let’s make a whole day for stationery shops everywhere to ‘wave their flag’ and say ‘I’m here,’ and that’s how Stationery Store Day came to be.”

In June 2022, Burkey went on Instagram Live and broadcasted her launch of Stationery Store Day: the first day that celebrates independent brick-and-mortar stationery shops. Immediately after the announcement, Burkey said, shops began to join in on social media.

By July 2022, the Stationery Store Day Instagram account already had 2,000 followers, and the first Stationery Store day took place Aug. 6, 2022.

In preparation for the first Stationery Store Day, Burkey also took on the task of building a website for the event, designing exclusive merchandise, as well as recruiting shops to take part.

“I never thought Stationery Store Day would take off the way it did the first year,”  she said. “I saw shops from all over the U.S. as well as shops in Italy and Germany and all over the world tagging the SSD (Stationery Store Day) Instagram with their celebrations. I can’t wait to make it even bigger this year!”

According to Burkey, Stationery Store Day aims to bring together people from all over the world who know the value of sending a card, love the allure of a new pen, and muse the possibilities a new notebook can hold. It also encourages people to support local small businesses as well as visit nearby shops in person.

Every year, Stationery Store Day will have merchandise designed by a different independent artist. This year, Eloise Narrigan, an artist in Providence, Rhode Island, is slated to lend her talent to that effort.