Is there anything better than a small, quirky shop with a whole wall of oddly shaped drawers and cabinets to explore? Okay, maybe there are one or two better things, but not many.
These particular drawers are at The Regional Assembly of Text, a stationery shop in Vancouver's trendy South Main neighborhood. Their website includes an online shop, which is lovely but no substitute for physical rummaging. Or indeed for the letter-writing parties held at the shop once a month, nice text-conscious people clacking out notes on vintage typewriters while chewing on yummy cookies and presumably talking to one another in hushed, happy voices.
It seems clear that this type of regressive behavior is in fact the brave new wave of word-people congregation. Bringing it back into a realm of physicality after too long in the sense-starving void of online unity. A word is an object after all. So where is London's equivalent to this place?
Also: at what precise point in human history did letter writing become a potential subculture activity? 1998, or was it earlier than that?