Sharing a love of paper and ink
I have always been a reader, staying up past bedtime to read by the glow of the street light outside my bedroom window, that first foray into the adults library with a slip of paper saying i could from my teacher. People who know me have said I don't read books, I consume them, even "Georgina eats books for breakfast", and even more truthfully "you couldn't live without books".
I have more books than I care to admit, I could open my own lending library (and tried to as a child), and for each one I have read I can remember where I read it, what season of my life I was in, how it felt to reach the end of Wuthering Heights (I threw it across the lawn from my hammock while on study leave in sixth form), to venture across middle earth, and to test my "little grey cells" against the might of Agatha Christie for the first time.
Books are intrinsically linked to our memories, and as we visit and re-visit the worlds within their pages and we come to know the characters better than we know ourselves we cannot help but cause damage to the spine. No matter how hard you try not to, if you re-read books they will crease, tear, and fray. I believe that those marks on that spine should be celebrated, honoured even, as they show us which stories truly mean the most to us, they show our love for a book beyond the stories within it's pages, to that copy that you've worn the edges of, and spilt breakfast on when you just had to read one more chapter, or scribbled your name in as a child and which you still pick up and read today to your own children.
Alongside my love affair with books I have also always been creative, knitting, baking, drawing, if I come across something new I will turn my hand to it with fair ease and a little practice.
I have a passion for stationery, as a child it was erasers (of all shapes and sizes). After the erasers came the pens, all of the pens, gel pens, scented especially were a favourite, the fountain pen was a prized possession awarded by my Dad for achievement, so it was only natural that a fountain pen be my weapon of choice when immortalising my love for books. Combined with ink and watercolour, which laid on a page allowed my love for books to grow further than I thought possible, and to be shared with you.
And that reader, as they say, is where we begin.