Stationery
Stop *moving* my notebooks!
stationery
STAY-shun-ree
noun
Materials such as paper, pens or ink used for writing or typing
Anyone who knows me reasonably well will tell you that I have a bit of an obsession with stationery. I cannot walk past a Muji without purchasing at least one notebook and a couple of gel pens (they stopped selling their purple ones for a period of several years and I went through a multi-stage grieving process); I have a plastic box under my bed filled with empty notebooks, next to a large case filled with fountain pens, on top of a metal toolbox filled with bottles of fountain pen ink… I could go on. I do not need an excuse to start writing Fountain Pen of the Week.
But I have always wondered: how can I combine my love of pens and paper with my love of words? By handwriting a book about words, probably, but that takes time. So as a quick fix, we can explore whence ‘stationery’. Is it related to ‘stationary’? Read on.
‘Stationery’, the noun referring to paper and pens, first appeared in English in 1727 and was derived from the much older word ‘stationer’, which is first attested in 1311. In the Middle Ages, a ‘stationer’ was a bit of a cross between what we would today call a bookseller and a librarian. They were licensed by universities (which were incredibly powerful institutions) to bind, copy and sell manuscripts and, later, books. These books could be lent, often in sections, to the students of the university, who could study with them or make their own copies. The only way to get the next section of the book from the stationer was to bring back the previous one.
The key characteristic of medieval stationers was that, unlike other merchants of the time who travelled from town to town selling wares, they stayed in one place, near the university. They were, if you like, stationary. In Classical Latin, a ‘stationarius’ was a soldier who stood on guard duty at a fixed post (a ‘statio’, from which we also get the word ‘station’), and did not move around much.
The jump from books and manuscripts to writing supplies is not a huge one. Medieval stationers were involved in the production of the manuscripts they sold and lent out, and so paper and writing supplies were in abundance, presumably sold to the students who were buying and borrowing the books.
So, to answer the question: yes, ‘stationery’ and ‘stationary’ are indeed related. The writing supplies are named after the merchants who didn’t move around. And those merchants, in turn, enabled the creation of more books by selling the materials students needed to copy them. It’s a rather neat circle, really. And seven hundred years later, I’m still at it: buying notebooks to make notes about words, which I then type up and share, which makes me think of more words, which makes me buy more notebooks… The medieval stationers would have understood perfectly.