...makes Jack A Dull Boy. Jack Nicholson memorably tapped away at his typewriter in The Shining, and our new range of QWERTY stationery and gifts takes it's inspiration from old typewriter lettering to create a great look for 2010.

Choose from A5 & A6 journals, laptop bags, wallets and mugs, available now in store and online!

It's an Edinburgh holiday, the sun is shining on this beautiful city, and this beautiful little sunshine yellow journal caught my eye as I was skipping around the beautiful Paper Tiger store this morning.

The first thing to know is that it's traveled all the way from South Korea, a nation of true stationery obsessives. The illustration is lavish, the quality of the paper is wonderful, you get some sheets of stickers to use (what's not to like about stickers?), plus the whole thing is wrapped in a very neat clear plastic sleeve. 

The pages are laid out in a 'week to view' style familiar to anyone who has used a pocket diary, so you could begin to record beautiful thoughts as soon as you get hold of a copy - available in store today, or shipped from our online shop to you within 48 hours of ordering. 

It's all change in the Paper Tiger store on Stafford Street. We have moved our gift wrapping department downstairs to give more choice from our great range of sheet wrap and gift bags, together with all our ribbons, tags and bows.


We have delicious new wraps from the Vivid range, from new designer Sanna Annuka and a great range of travel themed wraps to complement our travel stationery on the ground floor.

We now lots more room for our social stationery and occasion cards on the ground floor, so please pop along to check out our moves!
 

Oh dear. We introduced our travel stationery display at the very moment the decision was made to ban flights across Europe. The labels say "Par Avion" but they're at odds with reality. Briefly.

Amongst our team we have weddings at the weekend (with honeymoon flights to the Far East), home visits to The Czech Republic, and it seems that along with everyone else, we all have stories of stranded family and friends.  

Anyway, after this brief interlude it appears that the world will be on the move again after an extended weekend of clear skies. We are all so used to using our world "Par Avion" - the lovely labels on show below are produced by a company in San Francisco. The range includes wrap, tags, labels, note cards and journals.

These images recall a time when traveling was a little more glamorous...and a little less complicated.

This handsome chap has every reason to be proud of himself, as he's just appeared in our new window display, and he will be on the new range of Paper Tiger tshirts due a little bit later on this month.

The lion is the work of illustrator Becky Carr, who began producing cards just last year and has been part of the Paper Tiger range ever since.

Watch this space for more t-shirts news in the next couple of weeks!

 

We have got flocks of chickens, broods of chicks,
and a warren worth of Easter Bunnies too. They're all on beautifully finished cards, in amongst a great selection of Easter designs to suit all ages and tastes.

There are also plenty of Easter gift ideas such as pretty little jars of sweets and a host of gorgeous new stationery for the imminent arrival of Spring.

We've just received brand new Moleskine Journals to record your exercise routines, musical tastes or record recipe - each journal has a fully embossed cover, 3 ribbon place markers and double expandable inner pocket.
 
They are really useful, and brilliantly laid out. For instance the recipe journal has food calendars, food facts, measurements and conversions, and there are six theme-based sections to fill in: appetizers, first courses, main dishes, side dishes, desserts, cocktails. There are also six tabbed sections to personalize and sixteen blank pages in which to unleash your creativity in the kitchen.

I've just unwrapped a new Moleskine notebook; a simple act of sliding a thumbnail along the cellophane wrapper, the satisfying creak as the spine opens for the first time, the smell of the pages as I open them up for the first time. My current classic black lined journal sits its alongside the shiny new one, and has just a few pages left to be used up by the end of the week. The spine is broken, the page marker is frayed, the dented and scuffed cover has lost some of it's shine but none of it's allure.

This time around I've decided to go for a red journal. I've already added a little Paper Tiger sticker at the front to stake my claim on it's clean white surfaces; and later on today I will begin to scrawl some outline plans along the empty lines. I've just fished out the printable Moleskine templates that allow you to insert your own pages, and I will be copying over some bits & pieces onto them. I find it useful to have reminders of my fixed meetings and agendas at the front of each notebook, and so carefully spray mounting them into the opening pages is a statement of intent for the next few months.

This shiny red Moleskine should see me through to mid/late August - at work it will help me through Mothers Day, Easter and Fathers Day, the Festivals, and all of our planning and preparation for Christmas. Two members of the Paper Tiger team will get married during the life span of this journal, and amongst a host of celebrations and anniversaries, my daughter Scarlett will celebrate her first birthday. She arrived shortly after I had started the current journal, and the entries in my working schedule at that moment reflect the changes in my life, the paperclipped photos in the front remind me of her when I'm at work.

Over the next few days the old journal will be strip mined for any nuggets of information, ideas and stalled plans, to be weighed up and added into the plans and schemes that will inform the first few pages of this shiny red journal of hopes and expectations. Then the old journal will be added to the stack in my office, measuring out time and progress in lined Moleskines.

Mothers Day is just a couple of weeks away on the 14th March.

Paper Tiger has a great selection of distinctive cards for you to celebrate the day with your Mum this year, including this glorious rendering of a Liberty & Co classic cotton furnishing fabric. The pattern is called Field Flowers and was retailed by the iconic London department store in the early twentieth century. It's a look that has inspired scores of imitators over the years, but the original designs are true classics.

We also have a range of Liberty & Co patterned journals and notecards in Paper Tiger, so why not present your Mother with a fabulously floral tribute this year?

 

  2010 is the Chinese Year Of The Tiger!

This fine looking fellow is the latest image from the Beast Wishes range of animal cards illustrated by Maria Livings of Lush Designs. There are several other creatures currently cavorting across the shelves, from foxes and geese through to saucer eyed lemurs. Our shops are currently glittering with an array of new designs and products for the year ahead, with fresh new cards, wraps and stationery designs arriving every day.

We have also extended our Make Your Own Cards section in Paper Tiger to supply you with a great selection of materials to unleash your own creativity. 

We're looking forward to (another) great Year Of The Tiger, come along and see why!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!  

This Valentines Day, why not send a message in a bottle to your Valentine?

This beautifully proportioned glass bottle with a cork stopper also includes three scrolls for passing messages to your loved one. 

Limited stocks still available in Paper Tiger stores!

The Paper Tiger January sale is drawing to a close, and we have taken up to 70% off remaining stocks of selected 2010 calendars and diaries. There are also limited ranges of cards, Christmas cards and stationery ranges still available in our offer section, but they are diminishing quickly! 

Happy New Year to all of our customers! 

The new year is just two weeks away! Make sure you're set for 2010 with a new diary from Paper Tiger. We have an extensive range that includes the classic Moleskine diaries in many sizes and sizes, contemporary designs for your bag or briefcase, fun desk top diaries or something discreet for your inside pocket. 

Available Now in our Online Store!

We've been busy with autumnal hunting and gathering for the stores over the last few weeks. It's been hard work for us; but it's been immensely rewarding to see our community of contemporary designers and graphics artists rise to the challenges of global recession and produce such high quality work.

Our range of 2010 calendars and diaries in almost complete, and we're really proud of the range of styles and the quality of the images that we have sourced for 2010. The two diary designs illustrated here are by Campbell Laird, a successful Australian artist and designer who now enjoys the good fortune of being based in New York City. We have featured his work before on journal covers, and we really like the retro-futurist look of the work.

It echoes the design styles of the late fifties and early sixties, when 2010 really was the future and personal hover shoes seemed to be a realistic prospect. Instead of jet packs, Edinburgh is reinventing 19th century tram technology...who knows, maybe that will be running by the time we get to the 2050's...

Apologies for yet another post extolling the virtues of all things Moleskine, but my deep seated and long standing obsession with the little black books has been enhanced this week by the discovery of this neat little piece of software.

Now you can custom print documents, online address books and page formats on your PC or Mac, and paste the directly into your Moleskine. Over the last few months I've been doing a free style version of this by cutting up pages of information that I need, and then spray mounting them into my Moleskine, so having the custom sizes simplifies my retentive tendencies!

The events scheduler works with the Apple Mac iCal so that you can even print out your diary in a Moleskine style and have all your events and appointments synchronised in lovely practical papery Moleskine format.

The more meaningful question might be to ask 'why bother'? In my personal experience, using a Moleskine for on the go notes, meeting notes, ideas and providing a creative surface for sketches and plans does not have an electronic equivalent. My to do lists and diary events that I maintain electronically are a distillation of projects and ideas and plans that began with a pen and a Moleskine.

The MSK software simply provides another platform for me to integrate my Moleskine universe with my laptop galaxy. And indulge a stationery obsession!

The good people at Moleskine continue to develop new and more covetable ways for us to indulge our addiction to the their little black books.

They've done it again, this time by making big black books.

The new A3 & A4 range of notebooks include some really useful addictions to the Moleskine Universe. There are plain A4 notebooks that would look especially stylish tucked under your sleeve at any important meeting and this new size neatly fills a hole in the Moleskine range.

The new A4 and A3 sizes of Watercolour Books are something that Paper Tiger customers have asked for repeatedly over the years, and we're delighted to have such a beautifully finished piece of stationery in our stores.

I'm personally very taken by the A3 size folio for documents and things that need to be organised.

Take a look at this - it's amazing what you can fit into it!

Welcome to the new Paper Tiger online shop, where you can purchase special items from the comfort of your own home. We'll be updating the shop soon to include deals and events for the upcoming season, so stay tuned!