Grew up in China where domestically made stationery is insanely cheap (My first fountain pen was 50 US cents equivalent) and most stores didn’t carry mid/high end products knowing they won’t sell. When I was in grade 5 or 6 (early 2010s) a Pilot Frixion Ball was considered the biggest flex. I was lucky enough to convince my parents to buy me one. Imagine the feeling of erasing with it while everyone else struggles with bad quality correction tapes… that was the first time stationery appeared to me as something worth paying attention to.
My secondary/middle school was a semi-boarding school where students can choose whether they live on campus. Those who did live in dorms, for security purposes, weren’t allowed to leave campus at all on weekdays. I wasn’t one of them, and coincidentally, the apartment I moved to at the time had a nice stationery store nearby, ran by a family. As my classmates burned through pen refills from increasing workload, or just simply lost things, I became their stationery purchasing agent and would visit that store more than once per week. Obviously, my classmates know nothing about pens and most of them went “just buy me whatever pen that writes“. But instead of buying them any pen, I wanted to figure out what the best pen out there is, partially because I’m just a massive nerd, and partially because some of them offered to tip me for the labor and I felt like I should get them the most bangs for their bucks. So I spent an entire afternoon trying EVERY single pen and mechanical pencil in the store, and got familiar with the store owner. (They still remember me years after I graduated!) It was from there/him I learned about Kuru Toga, Alpha Gel, and shaker mechanism, thinking those were as advanced as writing instruments get, until one day he brought an OHTO Super Promecha and blew my mind. I couldn’t afford it, but it seemed like the pinnacle of mechanical pencil, yet I had never even heard of this brand! That was when I realized how little of the stationery rabbit hole I knew because I was limited by what my local stores offer.
So I started browsing online stores, and over the next year sequentially acquired a 925 25, Graph 1000, Graphgear 1000, Rotring 500, Smash, Rotring Rapid, and in 2017, an S20. Then there was no going back.
I still had never spared any thought to discontinued items, because “newer is always better, right?” That assumption stayed with me until Christmas of 2017, when I was preparing a present for a friend of mine. I wanted the present to be “of my own style“, to resemble me in some way. At the time I was already known as “the stationery tycoon“ for constantly selling classmates my extras, and a present of my style would naturally be an interesting quirky piece of stationery. I recalled the Uni Return’s M5-318 that appeared in that stationery store for a while before being sold and… never seemed to be restocked? I asked the store owner about it, he told me it’s no longer produced. He then gave me a serious look and said if I confirm that I want one, he’s gonna go look for one. I said yes, and a few days later he came back bringing one, claiming it was the only remaining unit left in stock in the entire province. Looking back now he definitely saw my love for stationery, and he made that effort because his love resonated with mine. That was also my first taste of rarity, and my inspiration that something worth owning is worth searching for.