Words on the Goods

It’s a gorgeous 55-degree fall day. I’m not in New York, and Joe Fox is a little overbearing in You’ve Got Mail, but Baron Fig is in New York, so I quote Mr. Fox in celebration of Baron Fig’s new School Set:

Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.

Baron Fig knows you want to buy school supplies this fall, even if you don’t have any classes to take. So you can get three amazingly cute (and functional… and high quality) composition-style notebooks with a bouquet of pencils in Baron Fig’s new School Set.

Each set contains 12 #2 graphite pencils and three 5.4” by 7.7” notebooks (72 pages each): black, yellow, and green. All for $26, with free shipping.

As expected, Baron Fig has done a great job with the aesthetics:

  

   

   

   

You’ve got to love a notebook maker who goes to the trouble of stitching the binding of their softcover notebooks!

   

   

Baron Fig really has paper figured out—100 gsm and fountain-pen-friendly. They are “school-ruled” (not as big as wide rule… thank goodness) with fairly narrow margins, but this suits my preferences.

Yes, the pencils smell really good.

   

   

They don’t sharpen and write as smoothly as Blackwings, but they’re not as expensive and they get the job done.

   

   

The pencils come in a nice tube that doubles as storage.

   

   

As with other Baron Fig pencils, there are no erasers, an omission that leaves me scratching my head a little. I mean, with no eraser, you’ll just cross out your work like you would with pen, but Baron Fig doesn’t even have stand-alone erasers available on the site… hopefully they’ll change that soon, as they continue to release new products. (UPDATE: I was wrong! You can get an eraser here.)

The pencils are super lightweight, and feel great to hold and use–maybe this is the design goal that results in no eraser? They’re not slippery at all, either–really easy to hold on to.

And I can’t get over how cool the composition-style notebooks are. They look just like the “real” ones, only these are more flexible, a tiny bit smaller, and (therefore) more portable. They’ve really nailed it with the “New Composition.”

So whatever you think about You’ve Got Mail, if you’re reading this blog, you probably also sniff school supplies like I do. So get your favorite eraser ready and head on over to Baron Fig (skip the long lines at Target!) and check out a set for yourself.

   

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Thanks to Baron Fig for sending the School Set so I could review it! This did not influence the objectivity of my review.