Editing The Pen Addict 252/transcript (section)

== Pen Chalet ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' So we're speaking way too much about pencils today for my liking. So I'm here to balance the table a little bit. Talk about Pen Chalet. They sell all of your favorite brands. They have Lamy, Pilot, Namiki, Sailor, Kaweco, and so many more. They have fast and reliable customer service. They do free shipping on orders of over $50 in the U.S. And they sell internationally with very reasonable shipping rates. In fact, I had a package show up today from Pen Chalet, which I had shipped over, Brad, and it includes my, uh, Lamy Safari Petrol Limited Edition, which I'm using today to run my show up for the show. So I was very happy about that. Pen Chalet has low prices on high quality pens and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. You want to go to PenChalet.com, P-E-N-C-H-A-L-E-T.com and click the podcast link at the top of the website. When you enter the password Pen Addict there, you'll get the code that you need to save 10% on anything at Pen Chalet, along with some special offers this week. And I say offers. Ron has gone all out this week. So. Yes, he has. One thing is that he's going to extend the 40% off on the Monteverde 36 pen zipper case because we sold out those super quick. So we have some more of those. So if you're looking for some pen zipper cases, maybe do you want to see if you're traveling to any pen shows, hint, hint, and you want to get one in real quick. That's a great thing to get. Plus, we have 50% off the Conklin Mark Twain fountain pen in either the black or limited edition demonstrator. And there is an extra offer this week, which I'm not allowed to talk about at all. I can't say what the pen is or what the price is, but there is one.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay, so this is the one I wanted to talk about. And you don't tell me this before the ad read because that's the rules of this ad read, right? You don't tell Brad what's in it until Brad goes in it. But then you don't tell me the part where Brad can't say about the one pen that Brad really loves in this ad. So I guess now people have to go see what it is.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, they can't say. I am looking at it right now, and it is an insane deal. Like, yeah, it's an insane deal.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I do not own this pen. I have reviewed this pen. So there's a hint for you. But you'll know real quick once you head over to Pen Chalet and use the code PENADDICT. And I know everyone was looking for that Monteverdi pen case because they sold out of them so fast last time we advertised it. So it is back and available again.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yep. So go check it out. Like, you want to see. You want to go take a look. You just want to go take a look. You got to. So penchalet.com, P-E-N-C-H-A-L-E-T.com. And click the podcast link. Put in the password Pen Addict, and you'll get those offers. Pen Chalet are also running a National Stationery Week slash World Stationery Day giveaway. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to all of the info about their discounts and giveaways there. So thank you so much to Pen Chalet for their continued support of this show and RelayFM.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So Caroline, Myke just mentioned it, and I'm going to jump this in ahead of the book. Myke just got a Lamy Safari, and I know you just bought a Lamy Safari as well. So tell us why you went and cheated on your pencil friends.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' I don't think it's cheating.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I agree. I agree.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' I have other patents. I really like Caran d'Ache 849 ballpoint pens. I have a lot of those. Yes. And I use a lot of Muji pens. Those are pretty great. But I've never owned a fountain pen before. And I have been thinking about buying one for a really long time. And Greg, who's our sales rep for Caran d'Ache, is always showing us the new ones when he's got them in his bag when he comes to visit us. And they're so beautiful. And I always think, okay, that's the one that I want. But then I realized a $600 pen is probably not an ideal starter fountain pen, even at wholesale price. So I decided to try a pen that is actually a suitable starter pen. And I remembered something on Twitter about you, Brad, talking about the Lambie Safari versus the, what's the other one?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The AL Star. It's an aluminum barrel.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' And so I went on jetpens.com and looked them up. And there was one that was like pencil yellow with a fine nib, which is something that I knew I wanted. That was a requirement. And so I bought it. And I'll admit that I keep forgetting that I have it. So I haven't really used it that much. I have a little desk in my living room that I use strictly for writing letters. And it's there. Sometimes I use it when I'm writing on paper or some sort of like greeting card that doesn't take pencil very well. But I'm really enjoying it. And I think like, I think this will not be the last fountain pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And that's awesome. That's awesome. That was the Safari was kind of my first fountain pen. And I did almost exactly like you did. I bought it. And then I used it for a second. Then I kind of really didn't use it. But it was a round. And then like over the next few months, I would pick it up more and more than all of a sudden it became something clicked and it just became a thing. And then now, you know, I'm buying from the Cron Dash Magic Briefcase too frequently, if you will. So, yeah, that's cool. I think you did good on the Safari. And you can't beat that yellow color. That's one of the all time. That's one of their most historic colors that they run through that line. So, it's been around for decades and decades. So, really, really cool. All right. So, if all of our listeners haven't understood how busy Caroline has been for these past two or three years, she decided to one up all of us and write a book. Because she didn't apparently didn't have anything else going on. So, she said, I'm going to write a book. And it's called The Pencil Perfect. And I got my copy in. And let me read the inscription because I did ask Caroline to inscribe. It says, for Brad, we all know the pencil is superior to the pen. And I can't argue with that. So, thank you for doing that. And I did get an advanced look at the book. And I want to say, I was, number one, I was super pumped for this book. Number two, when I started reading it, I don't know what it is about. It's, I guess it's a combination of your style and the information suiting me. It was like I was reading the most intense suspense thriller that I didn't want to put down. Like when you're telling the stories through the book, I wanted to know the next chapter. I was like, I have to go to bed. I have to stop reading. So, tell us how this book came about and why I love it so much.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' I don't know that I can tell you why you love it so much. But I'm very happy to hear that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, it's crazy. It's kind of tripping me out. I was like, I have to stop because I have to sleep at some point. And I'm sad.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' Wow, I didn't know it was that riveting. Yeah. That's so good to hear. Yeah, so this book kind of came out of nowhere. And it was not really something that I decided to do. It's something that I had talked about doing like someday. I didn't think I was qualified enough necessarily to do it now. But I was the publisher, Gestalt and their German art book publisher, they contacted me about doing it. And this would have been around this time last year.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' Out of the blue, they got in touch. And I had been in one of their books before. They had this other book. That's a beautiful, like very giant coffee table book called The Shopkeepers. And it's about shops all over the world, mostly that are like very like designy shops. And it's like profiles on the people who run them. And so I was in that book. And I think they had heard me on like BBC radio or something. And they got in touch. And they were like, hey, we keep hearing about this. Like, would you be interested in doing a book with us? And we did a couple of like conference calls and got to talking about it and eventually came up with an outline that everybody agreed on. And it was an interesting project because it was their first text-based book. Most of their books are image-based. And so, of course, there was always going to be some sort of visual element. So they picked an illustrator to illustrate the whole thing and graphite, of course. But it was mainly going to be a text-based book. And so, yeah, it was – again, it just all kind of happened so quickly. I didn't have much time to even like think about what I was doing or what the – like how writing a book in three months would affect my day-to-day life. So, yeah, I was really in for a surprise. That's for sure. But it was – they made it very easy for me. I had a really solid outline and I did it like piece by piece every week. I had different sections I worked on. And I had to stay up very late most nights working on this. And I did take an extra day off from the shop to work at home. Every Wednesday I worked from home. And I'm grateful that at that period of time around like last summer, last fall, I had a lot of extra help. So I had a lot of support. Caitlin held the fort down over here while I was like losing my mind and very tired all the time. So I really appreciated that. But now it's a thing. It exists. It's in the world.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I mean, holy crap, I guess. It's that awesome. And that three months is insane with everything else you have going on. And I'm just really impressed with the information you shared. Like I've learned so much. I think that's why I didn't want to put it down because I don't know this stuff, right? But I'm involved in it and getting all those background tidbits and a lot of the historical aspects of the pen and pencil. Wow. That was a Freudian slip, I guess.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That it just it's really hard for me to put down. It's just so well done and wonderful. And everyone should should pick it up. So I think the main question everyone wants to know, did you write the draft in pencil?

'''Caroline Weaver:''' I did write the draft in pencil. What? A lot of pencils, actually. I think it was 30, 39 in the end. And the end pages in the book, actually, it's the end pages in illustration of a bunch of like tiny pencil stubs lined up. And those are those are the stubs of all the pencils that I used to write.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' No way. OK. That is too cool.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' So it was all written in pencil. It's interesting history, though, isn't it? It's a lot of stuff that I feel like a lot of people don't know. And that's so much of my job is just telling stories all day. And so it was cool to be able to like organize those stories and like, well, really very heavily fact check them all. First of all, that was a little bit challenging. Yeah. Yeah. It's just so fun to share those things because most people have no idea.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. It's true about it correlates a lot with the pen industry in that time frame of the late 19th century, early 20th century when inroads in America are starting to happen. And there is a lot of infighting and theft and, you know, stealing of, you know, designs and lawsuits and things like that. It's it all happened at the same time, like in the pen world that a lot of these these goings on in the in the pencil world were happening, too. So it it's really, really cool. So I wholeheartedly recommend it. I haven't finished it yet. I think I'm about halfway through, but it's enthralling. I love it. And I'm really glad to see something like this on the market from someone who cares so much about the the topic that they're discussing. And I I hope it's doing well for you. And I don't know if you have any insight or can share anything, but I hope it's I hope it's going well so far as far as sales go.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' Yeah, it's it's great. It's very surprising, actually. The day we had a party a couple of weeks ago when we first got it. And that the day of I realized because we had just made it available online that we were going to sell out. And I had to have the publisher like courier 100 more books over to the shop in the middle of the day. It was a big disaster. But they got here in time. Nobody knew what was happening. It was fine. But it's doing very well. For some reason, it's not that it's not available on Amazon yet. Their preorder date is set for to ship in May. I'm not quite sure why. But yeah, but for now, I think in the US, we're the only people who have it. And it's been doing really, really well. I'm kind of surprised. There's been a lot of interest. Great.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Great.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I just preordered it on Amazon. Nice. Perfect. I mean, how can I not after that rave review from Brad, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm serious. Like, I don't want to, like, I don't make stuff up. Like, I'm not pretending when I say this. It was like, I was literally sad the other night when I had to stop reading because at some point I had to go to bed. And I was like, but there's more. I was like, this is a good story. So I thoroughly enjoy it. So there's my, you can use that on your next book. You can use it as a quote. Brad Dowdy on The Pencil Perfect. Oh, yeah. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' You can endorse my next book. Yeah. No, the second edition will have, like, have you on the cover.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' With, like, a pen stabbing through my eyeball or something like that. You know, or pencil.

'''Caroline Weaver:''' Yeah. We'll do that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So when you wrote this book, and this is going to kind of lead into, like, some of your personal tastes and likes and dislikes. I didn't realize, like, I've been eyeballing the picture in the back of the book. And I had no idea the story attached to it.