Tintin is back at Paper Tiger, with an extensive range of merchandise recently reintroduced to our store on Lothian Road.

We felt that it was especially appropriate to bring the range back to our Lothian Road shop, which was, for many years, one of the key Tintin stockists in the UK.

During the recent refit of the store we found one or two old pieces of stationery that had dropped behind the racks. There is limited use for a 2001 Jack Vettriano calendar, but by far and away the most interesting find was a Tintin publication entitled ’60 Years Of Adventure’. This book was published in 1988 to coincide with a travelling Tintin exhibition, and it has been languishing behind one of the original pieces of shop fit for over twenty years. Nevertheless, it’s in almost mint condition and is a valuable piece of memorabilia for any Tintin fan. The book contains a long essay on Hergé and the creation of the Tintin stories, followed by a selection of pencil sketches and illustrations from Hergé’s sketchbooks detailing the genesis of many of the Tintin stories. It’s an absorbing read and a fascinating insight into his creative process.

To celebrate the reintroduction of Tintin to our range, and to mark the successful refit of our store, we’ve decided to run a competition to win this wonderful piece of Tintin history. It’s a really simple competition! To enter, all you need to do is go online and ‘like’ Paper Tiger on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter and put a Facebook status update or Tweet tell us why you like Tintin and/or Paper Tiger!

At the end of the month we will draw a random name from the list of tweets and updates. The offer is only open to UK residents

There is nothing quite like meeting up with an old friend, and we’re especially delighted to welcome Tintin back to Paper Tiger! After the success of the film last year, we felt the time was right to reintroduce the classic Tintin range to our customers.

We have just taken delivery of a range of gifts & stationery, including the poster sized book covers. Theses retail at just £14.99 for an unframed print; a great price for a tremendous piece of illustration from one of the greatest comic book writers of all time.

PAPER TIGER IS PLEASED TO INTRODUCE TIGER POST!

This is a bespoke postal service, enabling you to beat the Royal Mail postage price increases.

For just 39p, Paper Tiger can offer a two day service for Scotland, and a three day service for the rest of the UK, for standard cards, letters and postcards. This is a huge saving on the new Royal Mail postage prices, and offers great value for money for our customers.

We are able to offer this service by working in partnership with First Post, a neighbouring business to us in the West End. They have years of experience in the mail business, successfully delivering millions of letters annually on behalf of large corporations and private clients.

All you need to do is ask for TIGER STAMPS when you buy your cards & postcards.

Complete your cards in store, or return to post them in the shop post box when convenient for you.

First Post sort the mail for us, and then the Royal Mail postmen and women walk the ‘final mile’ – delivering cards and letters direct to the door of your recipients.

We’ve teamed up with Pronto Pedal Power to offer our Edinburgh customers a fun and environmentally friendly local delivery service. Neil and his team a Pronto Pedal patrol the streets of Edinburgh, pedalling their fleet of cargo bikes around the Capital, fetching and carrying for local businesses and their customers.

We are offering the following introductory rates for orders shipped from Paper Tiger:

Same-day delivery from £5 powered by pedals

Free yourself of shopping bags by taking advantage of our delivery service.   We will deliver your shopping home or anywhere else in Edinburgh the same day.

The service costs £5 for deliveries within 2 miles of our stores or £6.50 within the bypass.  If you are willing to wait a little longer, next day delivery is £3.50.

We can arrange for anything in the Paper Tiger shops (or from Studio One) to be delivered to any address within the five miles of the city centre. Send us an email or give us a call on 0131 226 2390, and we can help you select from our amazing array of cards and gifts. We can send presents out beautifully wrapped using our Gift Wrapping Service – offering a really personal service for you and the recipient!  Mother’s Day is just around the corner, make someone smile with a hand delivered card & gift!

We have enjoyed our first week in the refitted Lothian Road shop, and we’re pleased and proud of our new look Paper Tiger. We have constructed entirely new ways for us to display our cards, stationery and wrap, and we have an amazingly flexible system to allow us to change the shop around in the space of a couple of hours. Come and take a look – it might be completely different the next time that you visit!

It took a great deal of time and effort from our own creative team to get the shop looking and working the way that we wanted. Great thanks goes to Adam Storey and the team at Four By Two for their help and assistance in understanding the brief, taking on our comments and ideas, and then presenting us with an exciting and unique shopping experience. Phil Green and Callum Reid at b:spoke delivered our collective vision in the form of our beautifully constructed shop furniture. Cate James supplied our stripes. A tiger is nothing without it’s stripes, and we love our new ones.

The first details and the final details came from our Paper Tiger team – from their knowledge of our stores, our stock and our customers. Their retail experience and presentation skills took the bare shelves and turned a blank space into a beautiful store.

We would also like to thank all of our customers. We’d like to thank you for shopping with us on Lothian Road for almost twenty years, and we’d like to thank you for all of your positive comments over the last week. We’re looking forward to welcoming you into the store for many weeks and years in the future.

Our Lothian Road shop is closed for a few days whilst we have an extensive refit. We will be reopening next week with a completely new look. The store will be transformed from it’s former self, with brand new fixtures and fittings and new ways of displaying our amazing array of cards, stationery, wrap and gifts.

We’re very excited and hope you will enjoy your new shopping experience. Keep an eye on our website, Twitter and the shop windows for updates on progress.

in the meantime, our Stafford Street shop is open as usual

Mon- Wed 9.30am – 6.00pm

Thu 9.30am – 7.00pm

Fri-Sat 9.30am – 6.00pm

Sun 11.00am – 5.00pm

You can call us on 0131 226 2390 at that shop if you have any questions.

We have Christmas Stamps on sale in Paper Tiger, don’t forget to buy them when you’re choosing your cards! If you’re sending parcels why not take advantage of our Gift Wrap Service?

To take a line from The Waitress’ Christmas Wrapping

It is my favourite holiday
But all this year’s been a busy blur
Don’t think I have the energy

Here at Paper Tiger we’ve got the energy and we’re happy to help with the busy blur. Our gift wrapping departments are bursting with a selection of fabulous gift wraps to use on your presents this year. We have simple plain colours, festive fun illustrations or lush glittery sheets as well as roll after roll of beautifully designed and printed papers from around the world. We also have an array of silky ribbons, raffia cobs, shiny silvery string and bows, and tags and finishing touches that will personalise your wrapping and ensure that the gifts that you give have pride of place beneath the Christmas trees of your family and friends.

Our Gift Wrapping Service is ideal if you’re pressed for time, need something spectacular, or you just can’t face the prospect of a night in with the scissors, tape and tags. For £1.50 per parcel we can wrap standard sized gifts with a simple sheet of plain coloured paper, just like the fetching red examples illustrated above (don’t tell my brother that I’ve used his Christmas present for modelling purposes). if you have specific requirements we can tailor our service to suit your needs – the combinations of papers, ribbons and tags seems infinite, and we have talented trained gift wrappers in both of our stores who can help you choose the finish that suits you. Ask in store for further details!

We have a selection of the most popular styles available in our Stafford Street shop right now, ranging from the Diana to the Fisheye. The Diana camera offers dreamy, radiant lo-fi images and looks extremely cool – especially the pocket sized mini versions that we have in a couple of different styles. We also have limited edition versions of the Sardina Camera – literally shaped like a sardine tin, and producing widescreen shots from a pocket sized camera.

1. Take your camera everywhere you go
2. Use it any time – day and night
3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it
4. Try the shot from the hip
5. Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible
6. Don’t think (William Firebrace)
7. Be fast
8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film
9. Afterwards either
10. Don’t worry about any rules

I would suggest that you read the Rules, take them into consideration, but mainly follow Rule 10, and go with your own instincts. The trick to successful Lomography is trial and error. It’s a very different experience from shooting with a digital camera, and the wait for the results is part of the learning process. Indoor lighting without flash will invariably disappoint, but cameras such as the Diana are available with flash, and they can produce some fabulous effects. The Lomographers on our team have had their best results outdoors on sunny days, creating bright and vibrant images. If you’re looking for inspiration, the internet is awash with shimmery, luminous examples of Lomography from around the world. Flickr is a good place to start, with some local Edinburgh images to see here.

Our current range is on display in the Paper Tiger on Stafford Street, and changes regularly, with limited edition updates and new designs. Come and click with us, and make something of yourself!

The classic book cover prints displayed above are a perfect example. Our supplier is currently a full time post graduate literature student and part time print entrepreneur, and we’re delighted that she found time to produce this wonderful array of designs. ‘The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie’ has a particular resonance for Edinburgh, but our current selection from the range encompasses a diverse variety of literary classics that are drawn together by the illustrative power of the book cover.

‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ has a particular appeal for me personally, as I’ve been assisting my eldest with her English Literature homework this week, and it brought back lots of memories of reading this book as a young teen. The cover of ‘On The Road’ is an illustration by Len Deighton, another string in the bow of the clasic spy writer and gastronome extraordinaire! The cover for the ‘War Of The Worlds’ is such an evocative and powerful image that captures the essence of the classic novel, and tells you exactly what to expect from the story within.

To complement the expanding print range we have also added a number of different styles and sizes of frames to match our prints and complement your interior décor requirements. The whole range is on display downstairs at the Paper Tiger on Stafford Street – whether you’re looking for something for you home, or looking for a gift for a friend, we feel sure you’ll find something distinctive and stylish in Paper Tiger.