A Sinful Stationery Fetish Reignites a Fiery Passion.
In 2014, my husband and I committed what some God-fearing Americans considered an abomination. We got married. On Halloween, no less. Ten years later, still married and remarkably unscathed by the fires of eternal damnation, we found ourselves celebrating our anniversary in London. And wouldn't you know it, I deepened my fetish of stationery.
Not the cheap, mass-produced rubbish you buy in a panic because your printer has run out of paper. I'm talking about obscenely beautiful pencils. Erasers designed with more care than some corporate identities. Linen-bound notebooks practically begging to be defiled with graphite. The sort of objects that make an otherwise respectable Creative Director weak in the knees.
The scene of my latest moral indiscretion? A little shop called Present & Correct in Bloomsbury, London.
And dear God, was it good.
Ten Years of Sin and Counting
In September 2024, Jason and I traveled to England and France to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary a month ahead of schedule. We'd tied the knot on October 31, 2014, just three weeks after same-sex marriage became legal in North Carolina. Halloween was already our favorite holiday, and the opportunity to celebrate our allegedly sinful union on the one night everyone else was dressing like demons seemed too perfect to pass up.
Somewhere, I'm sure, a televangelist was clutching his pearls.
A decade later, our marriage remained intact, despite numerous predictions about the collapse of Western civilization. We were simply two middle-aged husbands doing what middle-aged husbands do on vacation: walking too much, complaining about our feet, trying to see everything, spending money we shouldn't, and wondering whether the strange tickle in my throat was jet lag or COVID. It was COVID. But Keep Calm and COVID On.
London has always felt like a second home to me, although five visits hardly qualify me for honorary citizenship. I love its contradictions: ancient buildings housing thoroughly modern ideas, beautifully mannered people with gloriously filthy senses of humor, and the general understanding that you can be both sophisticated and completely bonkers.
About four days into our trip, we decided to separate for the afternoon. Not matrimonially, mind you. Just geographically.
Jason headed to the British Museum while I ventured off to Tate. I wanted to be impressed. I really did. Instead, I found myself underwhelmed and eventually sought consolation in the gift shop, purchasing things I didn't need to commemorate an experience I hadn't particularly enjoyed.
Art can be funny that way.
We planned to meet later in Bloomsbury, where Jason had arranged to be fitted for a kilt. Naturally. I'd gone to London hoping for inspiration, and my husband was apparently preparing to become the sexiest extra in Braveheart.
While he was attending to matters of plaid and pleats, I was left unsupervised.
A dangerous proposition.
What Did I Just Walk Into?
I was wandering down Bury Place, a charming little street near the British Museum, when a shop caught my eye — Present & Correct.
I had no idea what it was. No advance research, no carefully curated itinerary, no TikTok influencer informing me that I simply must experience this hidden London gem before it becomes overrun by Americans wearing athleisure.
I just walked in. And fuck me sideways.
Pens. Pencils. Rulers. Erasers. Stencils. Notebooks. Planners. Toolboxes. Markers. Strange little contraptions I couldn't identify but immediately wanted to take home and introduce to my other possessions.
It was as though someone had taken the contents of a particularly sophisticated school supply cupboard, sent everything to finishing school in Switzerland, and arranged the results into a shrine to good taste.
I wanted to touch everything. And I did. Respectfully, of course.
I ran my fingers over linen-bound notebooks. Examined pencils with the concentration of a diamond merchant. Stared at erasers as though they contained the secrets of the universe. I found myself considering whether I needed another ruler despite owning several and having no immediate plans to measure anything.
Even as a Creative Director, I felt like a bit of a fraud.
What the hell was half this stuff? Had I somehow missed an entire education in obscure European writing instruments? Were there designers out there who possessed secret knowledge about specialized sharpeners and archival paper that I'd never been invited to learn?
Here I was, a grown man with decades of creative experience, suddenly intimidated by an exceptionally attractive pencil.
And absolutely loving it.
A Considered and Curated Experience
Back in the States, we have Blick / Plaza Art, and, dare I say, Michael's. Fine establishments, have you. But Present & Correct was something else entirely.
It wasn't a shop that happened to sell beautifully designed objects. It was a shop that understood the objects themselves were design. Everything felt deliberate. Considered. Curated. There was a peculiar reverence for the mundane, as though a humble paper clip deserved the same aesthetic scrutiny as a piece of furniture in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
We work in an industry that loves to talk about craft. We put it in our mission statements. We throw the word around in presentations. We congratulate ourselves for our commitment to it, usually moments before approving a bland, committee-designed piece of mediocrity because someone in a meeting thought the original idea was a little too daring.
And yet here, in a tiny London shop, were people who clearly gave more thought to the presentation of a pencil sharpener than some organizations give to their entire brand identities.
I was in love.
When a member of the staff asked where I was visiting from, I told them Washington, DC, and explained that I was a Creative Director. Then, unable to contain myself, I informed them that this shop was essentially "porn without a paywall." I just popped into my head and went straight out of my mouth.
They seemed amused. Or perhaps British politeness prevented them from asking the excitable American to leave.
Either way, I wasn't finished.
A Financially Inappropriate Attraction
There was, however, the unfortunate matter of my bank account.
Two months earlier, I'd been unexpectedly let go from my Creative Director position in television news. A rather unceremonious end to an important chapter of my career, and one that had left me questioning quite a bit about the profession I'd devoted my life to.
I'd since secured another job, but finances have a nasty habit of following you around long after you've gotten back up.
This holiday had been planned before the proverbial shit hit the fan, and I was still paying off student loans fifteen years after graduation. So while my heart said, "Buy the entire fucking shop," my financial circumstances suggested a more measured approach.
How tedious.
I also had a peculiar relationship with notebooks. I loved buying them, but actually using them was another matter entirely. I'd fill six or seven pages of one, decide another was better suited to my creative genius, and promptly abandon the first like an inconvenient lover.
Some were simply too beautiful to write in. Which, when you think about it, is completely idiotic. It's a notebook, not the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its entire purpose is to be violated by thoughts, sketches, bad ideas, crossed-out words, and the occasional coffee stain.
Still, I resisted the temptation to purchase every bound object in sight and carefully chose a handful of treasures.
Then came the checkout. Oh, the checkout. My purchases were placed into a beautiful little black paper bag adorned with what resembled a vintage library loan card pocket, complete with a paper clip made from paper. A paper clip. Made. From. Paper. I nearly climaxed.
Honestly, the bag alone was worth the price of admission. Somebody had actually considered the experience of buying something, right down to the vessel that carried it home. It was witty, beautiful, tactile, and just a little absurd. It was everything good design should be.
This Was My Diagon Alley
Back in the States, I couldn't stop thinking about that shop.
Not Tower of London. Not Buckingham Palace. Not even the underwhelming afternoon at Tate. A stationery store.
Bury Place and Present & Correct had become my personal Diagon Alley. Instead of wands, spellbooks, and cauldrons, there were pencils, stencils, and erasers. Somewhere among those shelves, I was convinced, was the perfect instrument waiting to choose its rightful owner. The pencil chooses the designer, Mr. Humphreys.
And, like a fool, I hadn't bought nearly enough.
Why hadn't I purchased that gorgeous notebook? What became of that peculiar little stencil? Could my life have been immeasurably improved by an obscure German pencil sharpener? These are the questions that haunt me.
But beneath the consumer regret was something much more interesting. When I walked into Present & Correct, I was creatively exhausted. I'd spent years working in an industry that increasingly seemed to prize productivity over curiosity, process over possibility, and the ability to survive another round of stakeholder feedback that watered down the quality of the work.
Creative leadership can be a strange profession. You spend so much time managing the making of things that you can gradually stop making things yourself. You become fluent in budgets, timelines, resourcing, performance evaluations, feedback and approval processes, and all the other unsexy machinery of modern creativity.
Meanwhile, the part of you that once stayed up until three in the morning drawing something simply because you couldn't help yourself starts to go quiet.
And then, one afternoon in London, a fucking pencil wakes it up. Put Down the Mouse and Touch Something
I'll say something potentially unpopular. I think our industry has developed a rather unhealthy obsession with efficiency, and we've allowed it to drain some of the pleasure out of being creative.
We have Figma, Adobe Firefly, AI, and more productivity tools than any sensible person could possibly need. We can generate concepts in seconds, automate repetitive tasks, and produce enormous quantities of content with astonishing speed.
Wonderful. Truly.
But sometimes I wonder whether we've become so obsessed with producing creative work that we've forgotten how to enjoy creating it.
A cursor isn't a pencil. A digital canvas isn't paper. And a beautifully executed AI prompt, however clever, doesn't necessarily replace the peculiar satisfaction of making something with your own two hands.
I'm not suggesting we throw our computers into the Thames and return to illuminated manuscripts. Although, given the state of some creative briefs, the idea has a certain appeal. I'm suggesting that craft deserves more than lip service.
Chefs obsess over their knives. Photographers practically worship their lenses. Musicians will spend a small fortune on instruments that look identical to the untrained eye but feel entirely different in their hands.
Why shouldn't designers be equally devoted to the objects of our profession?
A good pencil isn't simply a pencil. It's an invitation. A beautifully made notebook isn't just something to write in. It's an opportunity to make a mess, discover an idea, or create something that didn't exist five minutes earlier.
If your favorite Koh-I-Noor pencil and eraser make you want to sit down and draw until your fingers hurt, I say crack on, you magnificent bastard you.
A Most Satisfying Affair, That
Present & Correct didn't cure my professional frustrations. It didn't magically restore my confidence or erase the disappointment of losing a job I'd cared about. And it certainly didn't pay off my student loans.
But it did something I hadn't expected. It made me want to create again. Not for a client. Not for a campaign. Not to satisfy a brief written by fourteen people who couldn't agree on what they wanted in the first place.
For myself. For the sheer, ridiculous, wonderful pleasure of making something.
I walked into that shop tired, discouraged, and feeling a little disconnected from the creative person I'd always been. I walked out wanting to roll up my sleeves, sharpen a pencil, and get my hands dirty.
There's something wonderfully subversive about that. In an industry forever chasing the next technological breakthrough, my creative awakening came courtesy of tools that would have looked perfectly at home a hundred years ago.
Maybe the magic wasn't in the stationery itself, but in remembering that I didn't become a designer because I loved software, production schedules, or sitting through meetings about how to make the logo bigger.
I became a designer because I loved making things.
And for one glorious afternoon in London, surrounded by pencils, paper, and objects of questionable necessity, I remembered exactly what that felt like.
Ten years after committing the alleged sin of marrying another man on Halloween, I found myself indulging in an entirely different kind of forbidden pleasure. And if that sends me to Hell, I hope they have a decent stationery cupboard.
I'll bring my own pencils.
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