The Quest for the Parisian Pencil
with a sprayer instead of an eraser...seriously?
“Paris is always a good idea,” said Audrey Hepburn apparently never, even though the quote is so thoroughly attributed to her throughout the internet that she might as well have. Still, who’s to say she never said it? For all we know, she sleepily uttered it every morning she woke up, especially when she arose in the city itself.
A month ago, I also woke up in the City of Light; it had been six long years since the last time. I gave myself two missions on this trip: to consume as many baguettes as possible, and to get to Le Bon Marché for Mise en Page. A friend had sent me the story in The New York Times before my trip, and reading about it made it a must-see destination. Long story short: fancy French mall holds book-and-literature-themed exhibit. Voila!
That’s the can’t-miss sculpture right as you walk in. On the second floor (which equals floor 1 in Europe), there’s a part of this gigantic figure you can touch, and it felt firm and cushy, like a hardened yoga mat.
And now, a view of the space:
Pretty and color-coordinated, and very much in the retail therapy mold. Like Disneyworld and the like, everything was overpriced, but I expected that. I bought two of those Bic pens that can flick between four colors – I was unaware they came in other than black-red-blue-green – and they each cost 6 euros. You can get a pack of three for that price, but those cheapo pens would not bear the awesome insignia of Mise en Page!
But these little trinkets were reasons not for my pilgrimage. From the Times article:
Ms. Touhami is a founder of the Officine Universelle Buly beauty brand, and for Mise en Page, Buly is offering ceramic pencils that come with a scented spray that’s intended to evoke the ancient Egyptian Great Library of Alexandria.
After reading this passage, in my mind’s eye, I saw a pencil with a ceramic outer shell that, instead of featuring the ordinary eraser at its non-lead end, possessed a built-in pump spray of this amazing scent. Imagine, in the throes of writer’s block, the struggling scribbler could press down on this wondrous button and out came atomized particles of the greatest library ever built, to be inhaled for literary inspiration!
Never mind the impediments associated with this fantasy – for starters, the only time I write on paper is for a to-do list (which invariably becomes a not-done-list). For serious composition, I’ve been writing on a word processor for forty years (circa 1984, Commodore 64’s PaperClip) – I mean I used to even type poems on a computer. Also, wasn’t the Great Library of Alexandria repeatedly destroyed? Yes, over and over again – looks like Ptolemy VIII, Julius Caesar and friends, and many Muslims took turns burning it down. Maybe the scent of this spray was one of burnt paper.
Still, I wanted this, except I couldn’t find it anywhere, and neither could my friend, whom I dragged to this ridiculously posh mall. We searched high and low; we searched gauche and droite. We found a posted map that pointed to the Buly store (each merchant is an open booth in Le Bon Marché – there are no walls separating one store from another), but then we couldn’t find Buly at all.
After even more scouring, somehow my friend stumbled onto it; I think it was on floor 2, but please don’t quote me – I’m terrible with directions and the lack of partitions accentuated the confusion. Anyway – voila #2:
I took this picture not at the store, but from my home office. Which obviously means I brought the item back with me, but there’s a story with this, too. So we found a very helpful Frenchman salesperson who opened the box for a demonstration:
Ceramic pencils indeed – but they are entirely ceramic, and there is no lead to be found anywhere. “Scented pencils,” as it plainly states in English. Not real pencils. Ceramic equivalents, for the purpose of…
A closer look at the bottle at the top:
I don’t know what the Times reporter was smoking, but this is not a sprayer. It is a small bottle with what is unsexily called an “orifice reducer” at the top, like the ones used for dispensing essential oils. (Perhaps the reporter inhaled one too many perfumes in the vicinity.) What this grand adventure turned out to be was a quest for nothing more than a diffuser. The salesman dramatically showed us how to apply a single drip (just the end, just a touch!), then invited us to take in the aromatic reminiscence of a long-disappeared library. My friend then asked the question that had been on both of our minds: how much?
“Eighty euros,” the salesman said.
Even with the friendly euro-to-dollar exchange rate, that was still uncomfortably close to a Benjamin. Was I really going to spend nearly a hundred bucks for this…trinket? I mean come on, that’s what it really is.
“Okay,” I said, and took the box and my assortment of bookmarks and notepads and pens to the register before I could change my mind.
There is a concept in economics called the sunk cost fallacy, which has become familiar enough to filter down to non-economics. It means that after you put in a certain amount of something valuable to a losing task, be it work, time, or money, you linger and expend more cost instead of cutting your losses. You see this in card games like poker – after you’ve anted and kept betting round after round, even if you can’t possibly have anything good before the final card is delivered, you still put in more money just because you’ve sunk in so much already. I do think that had something to do with my purchase of these fake, smelly pencils. After searching for almost an hour, I had to come back with them, didn’t I?
But there is a happy ending to all this, happy for me, at least. Take a look:
That’s the receipt. For some reason, the register rang up the item as eight euros and not eighty! Initially when I saw how much I was paying, 87 euros for all the items, I thought…okay, the guy was wrong, the pencils were probably eighteen euros. But no, when we got back and I checked on their website, they were absolutely eighty euros. Funny thing is if you search for this now, Google shows you the result on the initial search but the page itself gives an error, which leads me to think there was some kind of a systemic issue with the pricing:
My friend and I agreed that in the end, I paid the karmically correct price, because – let’s be frank here – eight euros is about what this thing is worth. And it’s not like I just bought that and nothing else – I still spent a bundle there. So a win-win for commerce?
I don’t know if these les crayons smell like the Library of Alexandria, but they are quite pretty, and super, super strong in the scent department. The salesman was right in that regard; a little dab goes a very long way.
p.s. I did have one more reason for heading over to Mise en Page — it was a to deliver an advance reading copy of my latest novel to come, Lines, to Ms. Sarah Andelman. A very gracious employee gratefully accepted my gift to this super creative person behind the exhibit, which will run for another week (closes April 20)! So if you happen to be in the area, do stop by — it is a very beautiful exhibit.