Stationery for Beginners: What You Actually Need to Write Letters

There is a rabbit hole here, and it is deep. Fountain pens have a fandom. Paper has a fandom. There are people who can identify a notebook by the sound the page makes.

You need none of it. A pen pal letter written in blue biro on printer paper is a real letter and always was. But the physical side of correspondence is genuinely part of the pleasure for a lot of people, and if you are curious, here is the honest version of what improves the experience and what is just spending money.

Start here, spend nothing

• Any pen you already like writing with.
• A4 or Letter paper, folded in three.
• A standard envelope.
• Stamps.

That is a complete kit. If you write four letters with it and find you want more, then read on. If you write four letters with it and are perfectly happy, you have saved yourself a considerable amount of money and you are also, by most measures, doing this correctly.

Paper is the upgrade that matters

If you buy one thing, buy better paper. It changes the writing experience far more than a better pen does, and it is much cheaper.

What you are looking for is paper that does not let ink bleed through or feather out along the fibres. The specification people quote is gsm (grams per square metre) — printer paper is 80gsm, and 90–100gsm is noticeably better for almost any pen.

Worth knowing:

• Rhodia and Clairefontaine (French, widely available, moderate price) are the standard recommendation for a reason. Extremely smooth, almost nothing bleeds through.
• Tomoe River paper is the famous one: absurdly thin, takes fountain-pen ink beautifully, and — crucially for international post — weighs almost nothing. Twelve pages of it costs the same postage as three of ordinary paper. It is expensive and slightly odd to write on until you adjust.
• Airmail paper, the crinkly lightweight stuff, is the traditional answer to the same problem and costs a fraction of the price. It is getting harder to find but still made.
• Cheap "letter sets" from stationery shops in Japan and Korea are widely available online, cost very little, and are often lovely.

Pens: the honest guide

Ballpoint. Cheap, reliable, works on any paper, never leaks in a bag, and is the correct answer for most people. A Bic Cristal has written more letters than every fountain pen in history combined.

Gel pen. Smoother than ballpoint, comes in every colour, dries slower — which matters if you are left-handed. Uni-ball Signo and Pilot G2 are the ones people keep coming back to. This is the best value upgrade in writing instruments.

Rollerball. Wet, dark, lovely line. Bleeds through thin paper. Fine on good paper.

Fountain pen. Here is the rabbit hole. The genuine appeal: it requires almost no pressure, so your hand does not tire on a long letter, and after a few weeks your handwriting usually improves noticeably. The genuine drawbacks: it needs decent paper, it can leak on a plane, and refilling it is a small ritual you either enjoy or resent.

If you want to try one without commitment, the entry-level pens that people actually recommend are the Pilot Metropolitan, the Lamy Safari, the TWSBI Eco and the Platinum Preppy — the last of which costs about as much as a sandwich and writes better than it has any right to. Do not start at the expensive end. A €200 pen does not write €190 better than a €10 one; it is jewellery that happens to work.

Ink, if you go that way, is where the real fun is: it comes in hundreds of colours, a bottle lasts years, and shading inks that pool darker at the ends of strokes make ordinary handwriting look considerably better than it is.

Envelopes and the weight problem

Every gram counts against your postage band, so:

• Thin envelopes are worth choosing deliberately. Some decorative ones weigh as much as three sheets of paper.
• Glassine and vellum envelopes look lovely and weigh nothing, but are semi-transparent — fine for the enclosure, not for the letter.
• Do not use padded envelopes unless you are sending an object; they change your postage class entirely.

Weigh your finished letter before you go to the post office. A cheap kitchen scale settles the question in five seconds and will save you the walk back.

The extras that are actually worth it

• Washi tape. Japanese decorative paper tape, weighs nothing, costs little, instantly makes a plain letter look considered. The single highest ratio of effect to effort in this entire hobby.
• A wax seal. More durable than you think in the post if you use flexible sealing wax rather than traditional brittle wax. Enormously satisfying. Slightly ridiculous. Do it anyway.
• Stickers, ephemera, ticket stubs, museum leaflets, sweet wrappers, a pressed leaf (check biosecurity rules first — see our mail guide). These flat, near-weightless scraps of ordinary life are, in our experience, the things pen pals keep longest.
• A rubber stamp with your name or a small illustration. Cheap, reusable, and makes an envelope recognisable in a stack of post.

The extras that are not

• Expensive pens as a starting point. Buy the €10 one, write fifty letters, and then decide.
• Fountain pen ink samples in bulk before you own a pen you like.
• Heavy decorated card sets that eat your postage allowance.
• Anything you buy in order to feel like a person who writes letters rather than in order to write one. This is a real trap and it is expensive.

Handwriting

Two practical notes. First, nobody minds messy handwriting; they mind illegible handwriting, and the difference is mostly speed. Slowing down by about twenty per cent fixes most of it.

Second, if you are writing to someone who reads your language as a second language, write clearly and avoid heavy cursive. Joined-up handwriting that a native reads without thinking can be genuinely impenetrable to a learner. Print if in doubt, and consider it a courtesy rather than a compromise.

The point of all this

The object matters because the object is the part that survives. Nobody keeps a chat log. A great many people have a shoebox.

Someone opening an envelope from four thousand kilometres away, with a stamp they have never seen, tape on the flap, a museum ticket falling out and a sheet of paper covered in your actual handwriting, is receiving a small physical event. It costs about the same as a coffee.

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