Top 10 Crazy Stationery Facts

Although it may shock you to find out…. But it turns out that not everyone finds office stationery supplies as exciting as us. Shocking. We know. SO. We have put together a few of the most unusual, weird, and downright crazy stationery facts to jazz things up a little.

1. Bic may like to boast that their ballpoint pens can produce up to 2 miles of writing, but the trusty old pencil can produce an incredible 35 miles worth! That means that you could draw a straight line to the moon using only 6,825 pencils compared to the staggering 477,710 pens you would need.

2. The modern day pencil eraser was discovered by mistake like all good things in life. Back in the day, before this was discovered, people would use stale bread crumbs or bread crusts to erase their pencil marks. However, in reaching for what we assume was part of his lunch to fix an error, the ‘inventor’ grabbed a piece of rubber by mistake and inadvertently found that this worked much better…. And he was left with more lunch to eat. Win win!

3. Chewing on your pen lid could kill you. Yes. You read that correctly. Pen lids cause, on average, 100 deaths EVERY YEAR. This became such a problem that many manufacturers now put a hole in the lid to help prevent users from choking.

4. Don’t you just hate it when you’re in the middle of swimming across the English Channel and you remember something you need to put on your shopping list? Well, you’re in luck! Pencils can actually write under water. No, we’re not lying, we actually tried this ourselves… although the paper didn’t really stand up to the task very well.

5. It has been calculated (by someone with a lot of time on their hands) that 1 pine tree, on average, can produce up to 80,000 sheets of paper. Now just to put that into perspective for you, 1 standard box of printer paper contains 2,500 sheets. So that would work out at 32 boxes of paper. Laid end to end that paper would be the length of over 147 miles.

6. Every sheet of paper, no matter how big, can only be folded in half the same amount of times. Currently, this is recorded at 13 folds. This means that regardless of how big a piece of paper is, due to each fold causing the paper's thickness to double and the sides to become stronger, the natural limit will always stop the folding at some point.

7. Being bad at your job, may just mean you end up creating something amazing. In 1968, Spencer Silver was working on creating a super strong adhesive, and instead failed and was left with a pretty weak adhesive that could be removed leaving  no residue. Thus, the Post-It note was created. Not only that, but it has since been worked out (by someone else with too much time on their hands) that it would take 507,000,000 Post-It notes to circle the world once.

8. The world’s most expensive pen, the Fulgor Nocturnus, sold for a whopping $8,000,000. Luckily, none of the pens we stock are that expensive!

9. Paper was created around 2,000 years ago by a eunuch named Ts’ai Lun in China. HOWEVER, the pen was created some 4,000 years prior, in Egypt. It begs the question… what were they writing on?! 

10. Well… your answer to the above question. Vellum parchment originally,was created by using the best quality animal skin, most commonly calf, sheep or goat. LUCKILY, technology has come a long way since then and the vellum paper we now know is made of a synthetic plant material.