Stationery is utterly simple; So efficient, effective, and ordinary that it goes unnoticed. But in it lay many magical complexities.
There’s So Much More to the Story of Stationery
These innocuous objects hold the power to transport us into past and future. On some days they remind us of who we used to be. On others, they stand witness to the future we’re building. The evidence surrounds us – old letters, fountain pens, swollen diaries, meticulously coded planners, postcards from distant shores, and crisp notebooks safely tucked-away – first steps toward writing a novel or planning that world tour! Our histories, memories, aspirations and stories are intertwined with stationery, and stationery has its stories too.
There are tales of ergonomic design and brilliant products, from accidental inventions to bitter rivalries. There are stationery objects that have survived historical upheavals, manufacturing processes that thrill as much as the world they were conceived in, people who worked hard and took leaps of faith into the unknown, families and brands whose adventures are inseparable from these iconic office supplies and art tools.
Stationery and Us
We too have our personal bonds with stationery.
One of us was born into a family of stationers. A classic 1940s tale of moving to Bombay for opportunity, the struggle and then the triumph of setting up a notebook manufacturing unit and a stationery store. That store still exists, 75 years later, and those dusty lanes around Crawford Market are a cherished childhood memory.
The other one remembers vividly those infrequent walks back home from the local stationery store with a bulging bag of loot, before school reopened after the vacations. After the school year, old notebooks were plundered to make an armada of origami boats, planes and birds, until the stitched-binding of those strained school notebooks collapsed.
Through art, work, familial history, or passion, for us stationery continues to be life.
Stationery and You
It is that passion we wish to share with you. At Inky Memo, we want to create a way for those who love stationery to truly engage with all its fascinating aspects. We’d like to hear your stories and share them into this vast parallel story of the world we’re building. We’d like to help you, the stationery enthusiasts, the creative, and the naturally inquisitive, to engage with each other through the common ground of stationery. Many of us are self-confessed stationery addicts and collectors; With Inky Memo, we’d love to take this a step further. Our hope is to spark a distant memory, to make you smile, and to change the way you look at your work desk, pencil box or stationery drawer forever.
Meet the Team
Founders
Minjal Kadakia
minjalkadakia.com
Samir Bharadwaj
samirbharadwaj.com
Contributors
Vishal K Bharadwaj
allvishal.com
“We’re only supposed to be interested in the big things that most people like, while the things we all deal with on a day-to-day basis are, for some reason, not meant to be given any thought. But someone, somewhere, has to know about that stuff. Otherwise nothing would ever get done.” — James Ward